Amelia's army crawl

Keeping Up

School is out, and the girls are raring to get out and have some fun. I'm not sure what that will entail, but I hope I can keep up. We'll visit parks and have picnics, do some crafting, eat lots of ice pops, do some sewing, celebrate birthdays, and hopefully work in some spelling and multiplication business as well. Madelyn took this photo of me and baby. She wants to practice her photography skills along with dozens of other things, so we 'll see how it goes!

baby with giant flower on head

Do we love the giant flower or no?

No more auto-shoot for me

I have been wanting to go full manual with my camera for a long time, but never seemed to have the time or brain power to jump in and experiment. The last couple weeks I finally did it, and have been thrilled with the results. My straight out of camera photos are much better, and the manual settings give me so much more freedom when indoors, and not right next to a good light source. Anyway - it has been fun and eye-opening. The photo above was shot in the shadow behind our couch, but turned out lovely. I love seeing Hope "reading" one of her favorite books about a mermaid, and it's also nice to have her blanky in the foreground. She loves that thing like nobody's business.

A friend came over this morning to talk photography. I helped her to understand her camera a little better, and it was a fun excuse to make some pretty flower clips for my girl models.

Love this in black and white, too!

Banana Pancakes

Hee Hee

Happy Mothers Day

I have had a lovely Mother's Day, complete with chocolate, flowers, a clean house, notes and homemade books.

Jon honored the women in his life in a talk at church, and has made sure I have everything I need. He even got to stay home from morning Bishopric meetings to help get us out to church together.

We took these portraits of the girls to send to the grandmas. (I hope you got your packages yesterday?)

Being a mother is the toughest and the sweetest job there is.

It helps to be surrounded by the ones we love most.