Today was the hottest day this year. I took the kids to the library and then to the park to play with some friends and have lunch. Then we came home and they took 3 hour naps :)This gave me plenty of time to catch up on neglected house work and I was also able to work on the rodeo pictures I took on Friday night. They look a little fuzzy/soft because I had to use a noise reduction filter (Noise Ninja rocks!). The lighting was so bad that I'm surprised any of them even came out so I'm pretty happy with the results.





And for today's 365 picture: My goofy girl :)

Rodeo, Work day, and Storyboards

This was a busy and tiring weekend! Friday night I went to a rodeo in Kansas City with my aunt,uncle, and cousin. It was fun, but not as exciting as we'd hoped. I took a few pictures, but haven't even had time to upload them yet :/ Hope to do that tomorrow! We didn't get home until 1:30am and then had to be up the next morning to go to Frick Park for a Arena work day. We spent the whole day scraping old paint off bleachers, and putting a fresh coat of paint on them as well as the cattle shoots. It was a lot of work (and more to be done) but it looked a lot better when we finished for the day. We got home around 3pm and the kids both took nice long naps and so did we!
Today we stayed home and it was nice to not have to get dressed until noon :) The kids and I played outside while Dennis did some work, and we grilled some burgers and hung out on the deck for dinner :) I also placed my first order with a photo printing company. There are a couple of rodeos coming up that I plan to sell pictures at and needed to do a test run to see how this printer works out.
Here are a couple of storyboards I worked on this weekend. I think they turned out pretty good :)


Night all!

Cody's Graduation and Will the rain ever stop?!

On Tuesday my cousin Cody graduated from high school and I took pictures for his family. The lighting in the building was the worst I've shot in yet. The pictures are all pretty grainy, but otherwise I think I got some decent pictures.
Tuesday was also Hollie's last day at school. I took a picture of her to compare to the picture of her on her first day of school and it's amazing to see how much she's grown and changed since then!


Yesterday it rained all day long again. I took some pictures of the kids, mostly working on clarity and sharpness, and also to experiment more with indoor, low lighting.
I just love baby feet :)

And today was rain, rain and more rain. The kids and I are so tired of being cooped up in the house! I babysat our cousin Gracie today though so that was a nice change of pace and the kids enjoyed the company :) Unfortunately I did not get any pictures taken today as having 3 kids here today was more than enough to keep me busy! And I have spent this entire evening preparing for an upcoming rodeo in which I plan to allow parents and participants to order photos and collages from the day. So looking forward to that! And I hope it all goes smoothly....we will see...
I will try to make up for not taking any pictures today tomorrow (make sense? lol)

365 catch-up and Socks

This weekend it literally rained non-stop for nearly 3 days straight. Blah! Needless to say we didn't do a whole lot (except get on eachother's nerves a little!) And I didn't really get any great pictures since we stayed inside and the lighting was terrible. It was so cloudy and gloomy outside that opening the curtains did no good.

Saturday was the city wide garage sale, and I was planning to have one myself to get rid of some baby stuff. But I took one look out the window and decided to opt out. So instead we hung out in the house and watched a couple movies and played trains with the kids. Here is a shot of Mav playing with Dennis' breifcase for work. He carried that thing around for over an hour, zipping and un-zipping the pockets, putting toys in, and even walked around wearing Dennis' name badge waving at everyone and saying "Bye-bye". It was pretty cute :)


Sunday was more of the same. Hollie and I went to Blockbuster and rented a couple movies. One of her picks was "The Last Unicorn". That was my favorite movie when I was a little kid so I was kind of looking forward to watching for the first time in 20 years myself :) It was just as I remembered and Hollie couldn't peel her eyes off it. She's been asking all day to watch it again, lol.
Sunday's picture is of Mav again. He loves bubbles, so after lunch when we washed our hands I plugged the sink and let him play in the bubbles for a while. Ah...the simple things in life :) If only everyone were that easily entertained!


Ok and today (Monday) it was more rain. GRRRRR. The kids are wound up tighter than an eight day clock since they have not been able to play outside since Friday evening. Again, we didn't do a whole lot. Hollie and I watched another movie while Mav took his a.m. nap, and then after lunch we went to the grocery store. I pretty much dread taking both kids grocery shopping, but I desperately needed to go and it gave us something to do. To my delight the kids were very well behaved, Hollie was a great helper, and Mav actually sat still in the basket and did not have one single melt-down (a miracle in and of itself!)
Thankfully this afternoon the rain stopped and the sun made an appearance FINALLY! After dinner we took the kids for a walk. Hollie rode her bike (she's getting quite good at it) and Mav rode in the wagon....for all of 10 minutes, then wanted out and to be held. We told him either walk or ride in the wagon, but we're not holding him. So he whined and cried and made several stops to sit down in protest for the remaining 20 minutes of our walk. Toddlers.... lol.

Finally, I have been spending some time in a couple of photography forums trying to learn as much as I can, and found one that has daily, weekly and monthly contest. I entered a couple, but the one that I think will be most fun is a 15 day contest in which we are to take a picture of socks everyday for 15 days. Here's day one's entry. Every time Hollie comes in the door, we tell her to take her shoes off and put them by the door. And it never fails that she pulls her socks off and leaves them wherever they may fall. She can't stand to wear socks unless she's got shoes on. So I took a picture of the entrway shoe & sock collection, lol.

Friday night BBQ and Austin's 8th Bday party

Last night we headed out to Rick & Kim's for some BBQ and Austin's 8th birthday party. I think yesterday was the only day this week that it didn't rain and it was really nice outside :) So the kids had a lot of fun playing and running around outside. And Austin got a 4-wheeler for his birthday so he and Cody rode circles by the barn most of the night. Here are a few photos :)

365 :: Hippie Chick

Here's my photo of the day. Going to bed now!

Sometimes I think kids should come with "Mute" buttons

The past few days Mav has been a real stinker. I'm going to blame it on the fact that he's cutting his eye teeth. He's pretty much driving me nuts. Though I have a feeling that once these teeth are in, the orneriness will continue, ha. This picture pretty much sums up my day, I'm sure you can imagine the awful sounds that accompany a face like this, lol.

I took the kids to the library this morning for story time. We were 10 minutes late (as usual), the kids would not sit still or listen to the story, and Mavrick thought it was great fun to run up and down the isles of books staying just out of my reach. Thankfully our library is small, and the ladies that work there are understanding!
I hate feeling like I'm the crazy lady with the rotten kids, but that's exactly what I felt like this morning.
Once we got home they settled down a little (Thank-you Jesus, Amen). They played pretty nicely together while I made lunch, and I actually got a shot of them snuggling :)

And last, here's a shot of a tiger lily from my Mother's Day flowers.

365 :: Flowers

My Mother's Day flowers were not bloomed yet when they arrived on Sunday. There were several huge blooms all over but none of them were open....until today :) Purple irises and tiger lillies (most of which have yet to open)

Today I bought Scott Kelby's book on Lightroom 2. I've been wanting to get it for a while and am looking forward to reading and working through it to learn more about LR. I am however incredibly frustrated right now with what a mess my picture files have become. I have been (or thought I'd been) very meticulous about where I upload and backup my pictures and have been keeping things super organized. But I keep running into problems finding pictures despite my efforts. It's like they're just dissapearing. Pictures I'd worked with and had no problem finding yesterday are no where to be found today....grrrrr. I know they're not deleted or gone for good, but now i have to hunt them down and figure out where i went wrong. Also, LR puts all these catalog folders and backup folders all over the place and it's sort of annoying. Apparently I have lots to learn...hmph.

Mother's Day and Monday

I had a wonderful Mother's Day. Dennis got me flowers for the first time in I don't know how long :) He also wrote me a card that made me cry,and gave me chocolates and bath salts. He can be so sweet when he wants to be :)
Dennis also smoked ribs and grilled up some beans and it was SO good! My mom spent the day with us which the kids loved of couse and I enjoyed chatting with her most of the day since I rarely get any adult conversation, lol.





Today I took Mavrick to his 18 month check up. I can't believe he's already a year and a half old. He is growing so big so fast! He only had to get one shot which he took like a champ, of course it helped that Hollie gave him a big hug and a kiss after his shot to make him feel better. He eats it up when she loves on him!
He's up to 23.9 lbs and he's 32.5 inches. 75th percent for height and 10th percent for weight. He has consistantly been in the 10th percentile for weight since he was born, but has always been in the 90th for height. So maybe he'll slow down a little in the height department and put on some weight now, lol

Kind of a crazy day. We were supposed to go to the park this morning for a playdate, but it rained last night and was pretty chilly and windy this morning so it got cancelled. Hollie wasn't very happy about that and the morning pretty much went downhill from there.
Luckily Mav took a decent nap this morning and Hollie was in a better mood later in the morning because I had to take them both for haircuts. This was Mav's second time getting his haircut and he did pretty good. I had to hold him in my lap and he clung to me like a monkey, but he didn't whine or cry at all and let the lady do what she needed to do. And it was Hollie's first real haircut. I've trimmed it myself a few times, but this was her first time going to the salon. She did great, which I knew she would ;) Unfortunately no haircut pictures to upload yet. I tried to get a few of them this afternoon but they were not feeling very photogenic so I opted not to fight them. Maybe tomorrow...

My picture for today is of my new peonies. I have always wanted some peonies for my garden, and finally broke down and bought one last weekend. It had several large buds on it then and they finally opened this morning. SO pretty :)


Oh, and here's a sneak peek at mom's mother's day present....shhhhhH! It's a purple smoke bush. Gmaw Sandy put a bug in my ear that mom has been wanting one. Hopefully she'll be surprised :)

Sheep and Rhubarb...jam?

Yesterday afternoon I took the kids out to Gmaw Sandy's to get some fresh eggs and take some pictures of her sheep. They were sheared a few weeks ago and she wanted some pictures of them without their wool coats to print and show at events when she's dying, spinning, and selling wool and yarn. We went out around 4pm so I think it was probably the worst possible light, but I took a few pictures anyway. I will have to go back a little later (or early) in the day to get some better pictures next week sometime.



Today I made some Rhubarb stuff (jelly? jam? spread? IDK) out of the rhubarb stalks Gmaw gave me yesterday. She asked if I liked it and honestly I don't know so she gave me some since it needed to be picked and told me how to prepare it. Cut up into small pieces, add some water and sugar (lots) to boil in a saucepan until really soft and mushy. She says she loves it spread on toast. So in the morning I will try it. To be honest, it really doesn't look or smell that appetizing. But I'll give it a try for Gmaw :) LOL