I tried taking some pictures of my youngest daughter before church. Braids are not her best look, but here are the pictures anyway.

Can I just say that I laugh every time I see our poor little tree. The kids get mad if I make too much fun of it though. They love it because we went up to the mountains and cut it down ourselves. ;)

Well, we had our first snow on December 1st! The next day we went out and played in it before it quickly melted away. We went from snowy, to windy, to flooding. We didn't get that much wind though. We sure can have crazy weather around here sometimes.


















Dad pulled our oldest son in a little sled. The snow was pretty much nothing but slush, but they had a great time. It was also raining, so he got pretty soaked.













The first thing my daughter wanted to do was to build a snowman. She was so excited.















Here is our family. I think I was a good sport to have my picture taken even though I wasn't looking that great. :)




































Of course the boys loved throwing snowballs at each other.

Here are some pictures of us getting our tree. It is such a sad thing, but hey! We cut it down ourselves! We call it "The nine-hour tree" because that is how long it took us to get it, and we almost went off the mountain too...maybe I should try and include that in the name somehow. My friend has good snow driving skills. She drove us into the ditch instead of off the cliff and into the river. Nathan and another guy weren't so lucky. Nathan had one wheel hanging over the edge of the cliff. The guy that was helping everyone RAN to his jeep and got some chains. Anyways, what a crazy adventure we had! BTW, there was a long line of vehicles trying to get off the mountain...they all got stuck in the same place we did. That is what took most of the time. Waiting for our turn to get stuck and then rescued. Fun times!

Look they can stand nicely together...for a few moments at least! :) I am not crazy about the framing and angle of this picture, but hey...I'll take it! A rare documented happy moment. ;)

Rainy Days...I hope I can survive this winter. It has started to rain around here, and I am already sick of it!

I have seen people take pictures focusing on the drops of rain on their windshields. I tried one, and this is what it looked like. It looks really fake to me...like I did something to it using Photoshop. I did very little editing on this picture. I did boost the colors of the tree a little bit. That was probably the biggest thing that I did. I also adjust the contrast and stuff...but that is almost what it looked like straight out of the camera. I just thought I would share how weird it looks.

I took the kids to Rattlesnake Ridge again yesterday since they didn't have school. The boys would have climbed all day on the trees if I would have let them. They just can't get enough of that. There are a lot of really cool trees to climb around there. Our oldest son accidentally lost his balance while jumping across some big rocks, and his leg fell into the lake. Poor kid had to walk around most of the day with a wet leg...I warned him though. ;)

I saw a spider web outside and decided to take some pictures of it. I sprayed some water on the web (I love to cheat), and this spider jumped out of no where totally freaking me out. ;) So I took a few pictures of him on his web. Too bad he would only show me his bottom. We won't use technical terms here.

A day out....

Well, I took the kids to the park and the railroad museum. They are about 5-10 minutes away from our house. The kids had a good time. It was a bit cold, but at least it wasn't raining.

We went to California a few weeks ago and had a fantastic time! We stayed at my Aunt D's house. She was a terrific host. The kids just love her. We went to the Rainforest Cafe, my cousin's wedding, over to my aunt and uncle's for burgers, the beach and then to Disneyland. I took my three oldest kids with me. We left "the monster" home with dad. She can be cute, but she is two...need I say more? My grandpa and mom were there too. It was tons of fun. Here are a few of the pictures that I took on our trip. I also included a few pictures other people took as well. I have been editing wedding pictures for the past week and a half, so I have only gone through a few of our trip photos. I might post some more later.



Here we are at the Rainforest Cafe. We went there with my brother and his kids, my Aunt D, my mom, and my grandfather. I am big time slouching (sp) in the picture, but that is okay, right?
Here we are on "It's a Small World". I tried taking this picture myself with my daughter's camera. When I think of this ride, I have to laugh a little bit. My oldest son really does not like this ride. He thinks he is too old to ride it, and he also says that the music drives him crazy.
He does have a point regarding the music. I guess it can get pretty annoying. :)

The kids LOVED the beach. I was a good sport and went out there with them. I even ventured out into the water with my camera.

Very Sad Day

We were driving down to Utah for a five day trip when my husband got a phone call from a client. One of my husband's servers had gone down. We pulled over while he tried to fix the problem with his business partner. We stayed at McDonalds for about two hours, and then I took the kids across the street to Burger King for a change of slides. :) We then got back into the car in the hopes that everything would work out. Hours before we even got to Boise, we had to turn back around and go home. The kids were bawling, but what could anyone do about it? It was too late at night by this time for Nathan to catch a flight out of Boise. So on the way home, I was able to take a few pictures going 70 mph on the freeway. Exciting. :(

Just going through some old pictures.

I am finally posting a picture of Shalene wearing her glasses. ;) She needs them to see the board, but she was told not to wear them any other time.

Here is an old photo. I try and sit down and go through old photos. I have to clean up my hard drive! I can't keep them all!

I finally found a minute to take some pictures. It was around 8:00 when I noticed the light hitting this tree. It looked nice, so I grabbed my son (who was in his bed and in his PJs), had him put some clothes over his pajamas, and we raced outside to take a few pictures before the sun went behind the trees. It felt good to take a few pictures and edit two of them. It has been a long time. :)

I need honest opinions. Really, speak up on this one. These pictures are not blown out on my monitor, but might be on others. I need to recalibrate my monitor...so besides it possibly being blown out, what do you think of the process of editing this picture? Is number three just too much? I have cropped this picture differently for printing, but for editing I left the cropping unaltered. Anyway, is there too much color? To much contrast? Thoughts. I showed three stages. The original (pretty bad huh!), my previous finished version, and the third is something new I am trying. Tell me what you think. If you think the middle is better, let me know. I kind of like the last one, but at the same time, I think it is too much.

Since I am all caught up on editing for the moment, I can actually take some pictures and look at them! Yippee! ;)

This morning I saw the light coming in our bedroom window and decided to take some pictures of Cam and Brae. I just thought I would share a few of them.

The kids are taking karate lessons and are really enjoying it. Ky gets really intense. I just have to laugh at him sometimes. He gets lots of praise from his instructor for yelling really loudly. I took some pictures although there is not a lot of light at all in that place. I took literally around 200 pictures, but only like 10 turned out because I had to have the aperture and shutter speed so low.

I really should be editing pictures right now, but I decided to take a little break from it all. Rebecca and I donated our time taking pictures for low income families at a non-profit organization nearby. That was a lot of fun, but now I have a TON of pictures to edit. That part is not fun at all! :( I decided though to look at a few pictures I took last month but never had much of a chance to look at. Here is one of Ky.

It is Spring Break around here! Yippee! Today I took the kids to one of my favorite parks. We had a little picnic in the fake barn. It looks like a barn but is really just a ramada (sp). The kids then went and played on the playground for a while. Cami loves to walk across the bridge, so after a while we walked across the river. Unfortunately, Cami had to have a time out because she just parked herself on the bridge and refused to come off. We played football and then went on a little walk. It only sprinkled on us a few times. The next three days are supposed to be rain-free, so I think we will go to the Tulip Festival in Mount Vernon. Of course, the kids are sick of the Tulip Festival, but I am bribing them with a trip to a petting zoo that is close by. ;)

Here are a few pictures from our little outing today. Of course, I had to take a couple of pictures while we were playing. I will keep posting more pictures as I get to them. Most of the pictures I take are so terrible that I have to delete them. Every once in a while, I find a picture that I like. It just takes a long time to find them. :) When I do, I will post some more. Here is one of Shalene taken right after putting Cami in timeout. Good thing pictures don't include sound.