Archive for 2018

Hello Lorena here... As an Instagram addict scouring the internet I came across a post the other day about certain planning apps that were supposed to make it easy to plan my instagram posts ahead of time and I was thinking yess, until I found out that you have to PAY a monthly subscription fee and then I was like, noo. I definitely prefer my own cheaper, i.e. "free" way of doing this, so here it is.

I look back to the way my instagram posts used to look like and I cringe. I cringe because of how unorganized they were. I mean if I took a photo, I just posted it without rhyme or reason. I just posted it without even giving it a second thought about how it might fit among it's 3x3 cube friends. Those were the good 'ol days of Instagram really. Now everything has to be curated and it's all about the aesthetic of your feed. It used to be the happy go-lucky instafeed but now it's the crazy stressful curatedfeed. It's a little insane really, but this is just the way of taking your instagram game to the next level. Is there such a thing? Yes, it's a thing! There's complete paid courses on how to achieve the most perfectly aesthetic feed in the whole wide world. It's madness!

HelloLorena Instagram

Ok, calming down... the way I see it is this: Each photo has to live well around it's 3x3 cube that surrounds it. I look at one picture inside the square of 3x3 and then try to make sure it is not being crowded by the others. I make sure they all have breathing room around each other so that you are able to view the feed without feeling overwhelmed by each photo. You gotta give your photos some negative space, i.e. elbow room, so that each photo can tell a story on their own.

Since I like each of my instagram photos to be able to roll on their own without the photo next to it cramping it's style, I had to devise a plan to make this happen. I got tired of posting a photo only to delete it immediately after seeing how bad it looked next to the last one I had posted. The only way to do this is by being able to visualize how it will look among it's friends before I post it. Not all photos play well next to each other, you know. So I found a way to do this free and so easy by creating an iPhone folder named "my instagrams" and arranging the photos within it to resemble my instagram feed.

As you add photos to Instagram, these new photos will go above the last row and so on. Here I can see that these are next in line to be posted. These are basically my "future posts" for the whole entire week! I am now able to plan my captions in a note or planner ahead of time and be ready for when the time comes. You can label the captions: Sunday 1, 2, 3 and you'll know which ones they are referring to.

So here's how I did it:

You make or find a picture for each day of the week. (I added my samples) They say you should post 1-3 photos a day, so this 4 photo grid in the folder view in the iPhone is perfect for this. You can put your day picture on the right or left side of the grid, whichever one floats your boat. I just happen to like mine on the right side.
Any photo that has been edited and ready to go gets selected and added to "My Instagrams" folder. These are photos that are completely ready to go so I never have to worry about the "not knowing what I'm going to post next" syndrome. So they go from "my Favorites" to "my instagrams" folder once they are edited.
I arrange my photos by dragging and dropping whenever I feel they will look better. This is where the fun happens because this is where I realize I may need more "human" photos or "cat" photos or maybe even "things" or "places" photo. If you don't know about how to create the CATEGORIES for your instagram posts, then visit this post I created about it. These just happen to be my categories or things that I'm into.

The favorite thing is that you can move photos around (you can't do this in the Favorites folder) or add a new photo in if the occasion pops up when you need to. I edit so many photos that my Instagram folder usually contain over 200 photos so I always have something to choose from.

So there you have it, you can now be organized and prepared and ready to take your Instagram feed game to the next level because now you'll be able to visualize how your photos will look without feeling each other out. Ew gross, you never want them doing that. If only those darn captions were this easy. Let me know if you have any ideas on that one for me.

So enjoy!

P.S. Here are the photos I used for the days of the week already in square format:

My little girl is 6 years now. Wow. They do grow up way too fast and now that my little one becomes my not so little one anymore, I begin to wonder what an amazing journey it has been. You know, raising little ones. The whole experience of raising children has been such an wonderful journey. It's been hard sometimes but it's the one thing I am most proud of. I don't want them to grow up yet at the same time I do. I have so much to look forward to.

Marina is my "surprise baby" because I didn't plan on getting pregnant. Well, I wasn't thinking of pregnancy at the time I found out I was pregnant with her. We had just bought a new house and were in the middle of moving in and painting every single room and I was going though what I consider a very busy time in my life both physically and mentally. I was drained with everything I was going through and then when I thought I must be late due to the stress I was going through, surprise! I remember thinking "how and when?" over and over and over again.

My surprise baby was also my most difficult pregnancy. At times I worried if I would be able to carry the whole pregnancy though due to my extreme back pain from an injury. There were times I could barely walk and many times I cried myself to sleep due to the pain. I wouldn't even take Motrin because I didn't want to hurt her in any way, so I just toughed it out.

Now I see my beautiful babygirl turning 6 and I know everything is always worth it. Everything related to motherhood is worth it and the most beautiful gift I could ever be given. Only God knows how much I love them and how grateful I am to be given the blessing to be their mother. Happy beautiful beautiful! I look forward to turning old and enjoying so many more birthdays with you. I hope that when you become an adult you always come see me on your birthday. I don't want to miss a single one.

Naturally she had a UNICORN party because she's awesome like that. It's all about the unicorns right now. They are hotter than anything else so I found it fitting. I found these birthday items at Target and I found this super cute cake topper on Amazon super cheap and you can find it here:

It happened faster than I can remember, as most accidents usually do. I was sitting quietly with my cat Rango curled up on my lap when all of a sudden I hear my puppy shriek. I immediately knew my cat had just scratched her face. My one terrifying fear has always been that one day he would scratch her eye. While she immediately looked scared and had some eye discomfort, I soon began to notice she was looked better and began to play again. She began to open her eye a bit more and was her happy self again. I thought I had dodged a bullet there thinking the scratch had been somewhere on the outside of the eye and she would get better soon.

Then this happened the next day. "Mom, why is Olivia's eye white?" My daughter told me when she came home from school. My heart sank. That's when I knew something much worse had happened. Not only was her right eye completely covered with a white cloud, she was blind too and couldn't see from it. We all busted into tears. "Oh no, Olivia is blind!"

I felt like a complete failure in being able to protect her like she needed to. A million things began to come to our heads as to ways we could have prevented it from happening. My daughter blamed herself and I blamed myself and I soon realized I had to focus and console her because she was taking it real bad. I was so sad at the idea she would go through her life struggling with her vision.

After I stopped freaking out, I did the best move I could've done and googled this situation. Remember, I am a new puppy mom and there are so many things I've never gone through with cats. I've had plenty of cats fight before, but I've never encountered a cat scratch another cat in the eye. They just somehow know how to protect against that. I do know this was a sneak attack and my poor Olivia did not see it coming. I mean, I didn't even realize it happened!

The next morning I immediately made a vet appointment and prayed she would be ok. The vet was wonderful and gave me great hope that her eye would heal. I returned a week later and she had healed to about 80%! The doctor made sure to tell me never to remove her cone as this could cause the condition to worsen during the healing process. I did exactly that and toughed it out all two weeks. Her eye and vision were the most important to me at the moment. It's been two weeks now and her vision has returned and is doing very well. There is a small scar tissue in her eye but very grateful she's so much better.

I wanted to bring this up because of how important it is to take your pet to the vet if you suspect a cat scratch on the eye. Cat's claws are full of bacteria and with a scratch it will introduce it into the eye and if not treated properly with antibiotics, it could cause blindness. This was the time when I found out just how much I care for this little girl. She has definitely won our hearts all around the house. You know this when you cry like a baby when they are in any pain. She is a sweetheart and even though an eye scratch is very painful she handled it so well and was so brave. I made sure to give her antibiotics twice a day and eye drops every four hours as prescribed. Let me tell you, this little girl may be small but she is so so strong. It wasn't easy but she soon learned it was for her own good.

I've learned to keep a closer eye on her and the cats around the house and teach them to respect each other's space. I've come to the realization my cats may never like dogs, but they have to learn to live together. I pray this never happens to any other little puppy but it definitely happens. I always feared something like this could happen, and then it did. It was devastating but a major life lesson. A cat fighting with a dog should be reprimanded immediately to prevent a serious injury like this.

Here is a wonderful page where I learned about the vet procedure: https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/corneal-ulcers-in-dogs

My poor baby had her first serious injury

Pages

So here's how I did it:

Lorena is Reading:

Favorite Thing:

Contact Form

Instagram