Five Year Photos

As per our yearly tradition, the day after Elora's birthday we went out to take some five-year-old portraits to commemorate another year in her life. ( I don't know why this only ever happens with Elora: Josh's wall pictures were all taken at odd times like "15 months" or "2 1/2", as were Jonah's. Hmm.)
I realized I had taken quite a few nice pictures of Elora in the last month or two that we lived here, but I really wanted to have some in her new clothes from her birthday. Why? Because half of the stuff she's been wearing up 'till now dates back to around her second birthday! I know, I'm so neglectful. But that's why she got a whole new wardrobe this year, which she was actually excited about.
So she picked out her favorite shirt (which wasn't the one I thought she'd pick) then we went out with the camera. I knew right away it was still too early in the afternoon; the light was too bright and harsh. But Joseph was home and watching Joshua while we "got the mail" (Jonah was in the stroller with us) so it was our best chance to get out.
We found a shady wall for our first attempts, which I loved. Then we explored some nearby cattle stuff (I don't read Pioneer Woman enough to know all the technical terms, sorry.)But most of these shots were plagued by too deep of shadows, fake smiles, or blazing sunlight. It wasn't until the last half hour of our adventure that the light finally mellowed and I was able to get what I wanted. Not that I didn't have a hard time narrowing down the photos: I had about 96 to begin with, and after eliminating all the funny faces or blurry shots there were still about seventy. Here are those that I'll most likely print...which do you like?

First the "blue" pictures. I love these, and I have to figure out some way to display them.





Some cattle gate pictures. For each one of these I kept there were soooo many where she was making weird faces.



Random shots that turned out okay. I think I should have lightened the orangey one a bit, but I was just experimenting:



These all had some things that weren't quite right about them- awkward background, too bright, etc., but I still like them all for some reason.





We went out by our trusty green tractor again, but none of these turned out very good at all. It was just too bright out, Elora wasn't feeling it, and most just looked like snap-shots. Ah well, we already have tractor pictures, right?




Oh, did I mention, up until the tractor photos, most of these pictures were shot while Elora was wearing skates from her birthday? Yes, even those where she was on the gate or other precarious perches.



Finally, here is where the light was suddenly beautiful, at least to me.




I will be using one of this group as my annual 8x10 for the wall. I know which one I like best, though I love all of them. Which is your fave?



Of course, this one isn't bad either..



And I'll spare you the redundancy of the whole group of pics, but these all looked great as black and whites too.



Not a bad day, all in all.

Sunsets on the range

I am lucky to have a window over my kitchen sink that faces west, with only a few houses between us and the horizon. I have seen some spectacular sunsets over the last two months, but it wasn't until last week that I thought about taking pictures. So starting now, I will occasionally be posting sunsets from around the area. It's hard to take pictures of sunsets, I've found; there are different problems on different cameras. For instance, mine tries to make it more red and orange instead of pink and purple as they usually are. But I found if I fiddled with the settings, or sometimes I can tweak it slightly in photoshop to get it almost back to how it looked in real life. Other times, the camera won't actually focus on the sky, but is looking for the items in front of it, or trying to auto adjust for the foreground instead,etc.
Anyway, here are a few I got for this first installment. Enjoy!


Oct 6th, 2010:



Oct 10th, 2010 (I thought this one was awesome)





October 13th (I saw it out the window as we were making dinner, and I just had to rush out and take a few shots!):



Oct 15th (when we were driving to town to eat out for Elora's birthday):





Oct 16th (The day I took Elora's 5yr pictures, which I'll post soon):




Its just annoying that the best parts are always right behind those light posts.

Family Reunion Time!

This is my mom with her siblings and her mother. My mom is the oldest, just like me! She's in the yellow.. and yes, my Grandma is taller than me by about an inch.


We have a family reunion with them every two years, and we always go somewhere new! Once we rented beach houses and visited Universal Studios. Another year we went to a Family Ranch place with planned activities. We've gone camping, stayed at Grandma's house, visited Nauvoo, and one year (right after we got married so we couldn't make it) they went on a Cruise! My mom says she didn't like that one much, because they didn't really spend time all together. Every family is supposed to send in a certain amount of money every month for the two years so that we can afford to go to all these neat places.

In 2008 we went to Bear Lake, Utah; we were lucky it was so close to where we lived. This year we had our reunion in a nice rental home in Idaho, just over the border from Yellowstone National Park! We were so excited that everything worked out so that we could go. We had a huge rental place all lined up, but at the last minute, it fell through. Those in charge scrambled to find something else- which turned out to be much smaller- but in the end we were so happy with it! The house was by a lake, near a pine forest but still surrounded by open prairie, and about an hour closer to Yellowstone than the original property.

Elora and Josh had a great time exploring with their first cousins, Isabelle and James:




Isabelle and Elora are only three months apart in age, while Josh and James are about eight months apart. (I love how it looks like Josh is going to beat up James in this picture. Kiera's poor tiny children don't stand a chance against my giant offspring.)

Meanwhile, Jonah got to know his newest cousin, Henry, James and Isabelle's little brother. He's only two months younger than Jonah, and he looks just like his brother and sister did when they were babies.


There are actually seven other kids now in the Great-grandkids generation (two are new babies), but only two of them could make it this year. Hi Keaton and Emily! Those two youngish boys on the side are my cousins.



My brothers Dain and Thorin couldn't make it either, but Thain was there! He's Elora's favorite uncle you know. And Uncle Thain might be a little partial to Elora as well.



Many of the events in the house had a cowboy theme. We all got hats and scarves,



and one morning there were even cute little cowboy duckies for everyone!



There were plenty of fun activities planned. One day, a bunch of people played capture the flag outside.

Josh only played for a few minutes because he didn't understand the rules; those are his teammates in the background, waiting for him to get them out of "jail." They were waiting a very long time.



There were plenty of inside activities as well. One night, there was a big gift exchange,


and Elora got a lot of people's extra stuff...


I guess everyone brought kid gifts, but there are still a lot more 20-somethings than there are kids. Thats a lot of people, even with several folks missing!




Another night, there was an eating contest for anyone who wanted to join in.....



guess who won?



Everyday there were crafty things to do,



and the best part was all the good food! Jonah ate more than everyone else, I'm sure.



Wednesday was the big adventure of the week, visiting Yellowstone! It was a little hectic with such a big group, even just getting lunch all together and finding parking was a big deal.


(I only included this picture, because I hardly got any pictures of Josh that whole day!)
We all watched Old Faithful together, (this picture sucks because the water just blends into the clouds behind it. Oh well.)



then we went off in little groups on the trail around it. If you've never been there, this is where most of the "stuff" is in Yellowstone.


We made it around the main loop, then a few of us took off on a longer trail that ended up down the road!



Joseph didn't come with us the rest of the way; he seemed to be having a hard time with the sulfur smell permeating the park, so he and Josh headed back to the gift shop or something to wait out our hike. Silly Joseph. Honestly, after about two minutes I don't even notice the smell, and I've been to Yellowstone about 5 or 6 times now. But Joseph's funny about those things sometimes.

I never got a good picture of Jonah here; he refused to look at the camera no matter what I did.


So I just took a picture of the pool.


Elora was always ready for a closeup.



The whole time we were hiking the longer trail (which took several hours), we were a little worried about Uncle Thain. In June he had a motorcycle accident and had to get skin grafts on his feet. He had just barely been given the okay to walk without crutches and a special boot, so we were hoping he didn't undo all the healing on his poor feet!



At least he got some awesome photo-ops with his sister out of the deal. The river behind us here was cool, parts of it were normal river water, while other parts were venting steam from below!



At the end of the day, we finally found a bunch of the extended family, and Elora was very happy about it, even though we didn't hike with any of them.


And Jonah finally smiled for a picture with Uncle H. I love how that arm back there appears to be growing out of my Uncle's ear.



We wanted to go on a few more hikes, but it was getting late, and many of the roads had construction going on, with half hour or longer waits, so we started for home. While we had a lot of fun on our hikes, I was a little sad that our last day was spent mostly just with my immediate family in stead of all of our relatives.

The saddest part of the whole reunion was that we had to leave a day early so we could get to our new home in time for Joseph to start work (though of course we were very happy to have someplace we needed to be!) I missed out on a lot of night time activities trying to make sure we were ready to leave in the morning. A small group of people came out to see us off Thursday morning,



(Mom's always a little emotional at goodbyes. Nice pajamas, Kiera)



and we didn't realize 'till after we left that we forgot to say goodbye to my grandma!



I guess she came out to see us off just after we drove away, it was sooo sad.
So we said goodbye to all of this:





with our car packed like this:



So we could make one more stop in our former hometown to pick up all of our worldly possessions (we were so happy there were a few guys to help again!) and to say goodbye to our friends and neighbors.




We arrived on the plains of South Dakota three days later:



To start our next adventure! August was definitely a busy month.