library time

Earlier this summer, we were able to have fun going to the weekly library time. It was one day a week, but it was a whole two hours each time! At first, I thought that sounded a little long, but they filled up the time with crafts, snacks, and outside time as well as reading. The kids all had fun and made lots of neat things, plus we checked out lots of books.

We have some cool Chinese dragon puppets, which are now hanging up in our toy room. (Also, this is our lilac bush!) We also had someone come talk about karate one time and the kids made cool headbands just like karate kid...Elora stayed an extra hour to make hers just right.

Another time everyone made some kites out of string and paper bags. At first Josh was being grumpy and didn't want his picture taken, but then he let me take one of him by himself. They flew pretty good! It just wasn't that windy when we took the pictures.




There was one week we had a fun pancake activity! The librarian made pancakes, then all the kids got to do relay races with them outside on the football field (The town library is also the school library, and is on school grounds.)

They all had lots of fun!

We even got to bring our cousins with us to the last two library days, and everyone got lots of prizes and even ice cream! We'll definitely be doing library time again next summer.

Josh's 9yr old pictures at Cedar Breaks

We took Josh's birthday pictures at Cedar Breaks while we were visiting Utah. ( We're tired of grass backgrounds, and we had to top the graffiti from last year). I thought the green trees and red rocks would look awesome with Josh's hair. It was also the afternoon, just like when we took Jonah's pictures, but somehow we were able to find lots of good spots for some photos. Maybe it was a little cloudier, and maybe there were more shaded places, but we got an overabundance of photos for Josh!

Of course, part of that high number is because Josh insisted that for every smiling picture, he wanted a "serious" picture. Surprisingly, a lot of the serious pictures looked better than the smiling ones (something to do with less shadows on the face). But because of Josh's big eyes, some of the serious ones looked pretty funny too.

A. The serious ones look better here. Or funnier, depending on your view.



 At first, Josh wasn't smiling very realistically (he was trying too hard), and it was driving me nuts, because they were nice locations. And my visions of red rock landscapes behind Joshua were hard to realize, due to the different settings needed to expose the person as well as the background. These pictures ended up looking almost fake because of how much they needed to be manipulated after the fact.

B. The bottom two are nice but maybe a little strange; the light on the top two is nice.

C The wildflowers were blooming everywhere while we were there, and we didn't want to pass up an opportunity to use them in one or two pictures. See, these 'serious' ones look pretty nice, right?



 
 D There were a lot of leaning-on-tree poses, but they worked pretty good. I wish Josh was smiling in the upper left one, the light is really nice in it.



E.
As the afternoon progressed (we went on the Alpine Loop trail, it was really fun) Josh got better at smiling realistically, and we started to get a few better faces. I love his laugh in the flowers, though the arms on the hips pose is a little silly.


 

F There were  a lot of neat staircases, so we had to get in on that. I think the bottom right might be the best face, though I like the background in the top right.






G We had to try this one in black and white too:


H  We got in a few good smiles near the end. I like the top left maybe.




I And we finished out the day strong. These are all pretty good.



J Oh, and lets not forget our couple of horizontal pictures. They were alright, though the light is bad on the bottom.




What do you think?

.

Jonah's 7yr pictures up Cedar Mountain

This year I promised Jonah we could take his birthday pictures when we went up Cedar mountain, on our visit to Grandma's house this year. I was picturing lots of aspens (which we rarely see in South Dakota) and how good they'd look with Jonah's blue eyes and blonde hair. I knew we'd be up the mountain at a less than ideal time- midday- because that's when my class reunion would be, and we wouldn't really have time another day.
As expected, the light was really bright and hard to work with. We got lots of fun pictures of everyone while we were there, but when I took Jonah's portraits, it was hard to find good spots for a really nice picture. But we did get a few! It didn't help that he's so wiggly and can't focus.

A. This group definitely has the best light, at least on the top two; his face isn't too shadowy and the background isn't to blown out and white.  These don't have the best smiles of all, but I'll probably pick his wall portrait from this group.
























B. We had to get a few horizontal pics to mix it up.

 C. The trees are pretty and he's smiling good, but the light is meh. Especially in that bottom right one. The top right is probably the best.


D. I like the location of the top two pictures a lot. The bottom ones, I took like ten pictures there, and these were the best ones. Silly Jonah.



Which do you like?

Elora's story

For my birthday present last month, Elora wrote a funny story for me. If you have the time, I suggest you read it; it's kind of funny. We got a new scanner though, and it doesn't seem to scan pencil on paper that well, so that's sad. I was able to fix most of them, although it did loose some of the lighter lines and fine details. If you click on each picture, you should be able to see it larger and read it, but I guess I'll include the text too, just in case.

 below:  Once upon a time there was a princess named Plum. She was very nice, and she loved her people. She liked to try new things. One day she had a crumb brought to her for lunch. "What's this?" She asked. "It's a crumb!" said her servant.

The princess ate the crumb."Oh! That was delicious!" Said Princess Plum. She spent the rest of the day telling her people to try crumbs.

The next day, the princess woke up with a sore throat! "I don't feel so good," she said. The nurse came to check Princess Plum for a sickness. "There's nothing wrong with you," said the nurse.
 

"At least I get chicken soup!" said the princess. What she didn't know was that she had eaten an evil crumb. And the crumb was trying to kill her so he could be prince and have servants.
 

The next day, she woke up with a tummy ache and called her doctor. The doctor said, "There's a crumb in your stomach!" " It has two eyes!" she said. 

"Ahh!" Princess Plum screamed. "How do I get it out?!" she cried. "You have to heat something yucky," said the doctor. "Oh no!" said Princess Plum.

So at dinner that night, she ate the thing she hated most: fried scorpions. "Eww!" she screamed. "Eat it!" said her father. "Or that evil crumb will stay."

So poor Princess Plum ate her disgusting fried scorpions all up. "It'll take two days for him to come out." said the doctor.

So for two long, long days, Princess Plum ate nothing but fried scorpions. Poor poor Princess Plum was feeling so glum But when the third day came, the princess was so excited, she jumped out of her bed!
 

She ran to her parents royal room and yelled, "Today's the day! that morning at breakfast,everybody gathered around Princess Plum, waiting for the evil crumb to come out.

Then after everybody was quiet, a crumb popped out of her mouth! "Those fried scorpions smelled horrible!" he said. And with that, he ran out of the room, never to be seen again.
 

And the kingdom rejoiced, and had a big party with everybody invited to it. There was a pinata, a feast, fireworks, a play, and a giant cake! Everybody lived happily ever after!
 

(I don't know about you, but I was really worried that crumb was going to come out a different way!)