The contest rules said the video had to be 1-3 minutes in length. The rough cut of this video was 14 minutes. I was able to get it down to under 11 minutes, but I just couldn’t cut any more out…, it’s just too cute. I gave up on the contest and just finished it for myself.

Now I understand why there are no cooking shows that include children – because what they’re going to do and how they’re going to react is completely unpredictable…, but frankly…, that’s what makes this video so great.

(recipe adapted from Family Fun Magazine)

I’ve spent the last two nights catching up on some personal projects from 2010 that I never got around to finishing. Basically, I turn almost everything into a project – family outings become music videos; my favorite photos get turned into a hardcover book every year – and if you don’t bang these out right after you shoot them, they start to fall behind. Other projects get put in front of them and it’s hard to make time to return to the stragglers. I’m sure you can relate – how many of you have hundreds of digital photos still on your memory cards that you never got around to transferring to your computers? A lot of you, I’m guessing. And the longer they sit there and the more photos that pile up, the more daunting the task of offloading/sorting/printing/archiving becomes. You gotta take care of these things right away, people, or else they’ll never get done. Sure, it’s hard to motivate yourself to do it, but you have to push through. You’ll feel good about it when you’re done – I promise. Nothing beats the feeling of a sense of accomplishment.

So these vacation and Christmas videos represent 2 of the 3 projects left over from last year. This weekend, I plan to design my annual photo album, at which point 2010 will be done. Then I can start to focus on 2011′s projects…, which are already taking shape.