Photo 365 #34

September 10, 20142 Comments

Our annual family photo book arrived today, a day earlier than I’d expected. So to celebrate, here’s a picture from said album:

Cricket riding Daddy around the room proved easier to capture than a nice picture of everyone in front of the Christmas tree.

I use Blurb to create these books each year, and the quality is fantastic. (This is in no way a promotional post; I’m just really happy with the quality of their products.) I ordered the first one for our first wedding anniversary as a way to document the first year of our marriage; I wish I’d captioned those pictures, but I didn’t really get into the different layout designs and caption options until the following year. I looked through the 2013 book this afternoon after it arrived and was surprised by how much I’d forgotten about the events of last year, and how much the kids had changed.

Every time we take a picture that comes out particularly hilarious now, we tell the kids it’s going in the book. Of course, with Miss Tadpole the reigning Queen of the Funny Face and Cricket and Thumper hamming it up at every opportunity, that means I have my work cut out for me when it comes to choosing which pictures make the cut and which ones don’t. Still, it’s a lot of fun making these books, and the kids love looking through them year after year.

Do you do anything like this in your family?

Photo 365 #33

September 9, 2014September 9, 20141 Comment

Funerals are exhausting.

Even for tiny little Energizer bunnies.

Photo 365 #31

September 7, 2014September 8, 20144 Comments

Bubbles had his very first football game. He spent most of it looking like this:

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That’s him in the #40 jersey. They actually have two kids wearing #40, which made trying to keep track of the right kid interesting. But apparently the coaches plan on playing the older kids more than the younger kids (the team is for fifth and sixth-graders), which I think is dumb because we didn’t pay $75 to watch our kids warm the sidelines. They work hard in practice, too, and they have as much right to play as the older kids.

Are all players equally-abled? No. Lord knows Bubbles shouldn’t have been playing receiver during the game because he left his glasses off and he can’t see (well) without them. But the final score was somewhere in the neighborhood of 28-0 and at that point, what harm would it have done to let the younger kids play? It’s not like we were going to win.

So far, I’m not impressed. I hope things change. I hope Bubbles gets to play more. I hope a lot of things, but mostly I hope that we didn’t just throw $75 down the drain.

Photo Friday: Party time!

September 5, 2014September 5, 20143 Comments

Gotta love a party, man. In my family, September is full of parties: my grandpa’s birthday is today (he’d be 79 – miss you, Grandpa!), Bubbles’ birthday is a week from today (he’ll be 11 – how the heck did that happen?!), my cousin’s birthday is the following weekend, my anniversary is the week after that (five years sure have flown by!), and then the month ends on my mother-in-law’s birthday. That’s a whole lot of activity to pack into 30 short days.

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And yet, today’s picture has nothing to do with any of those things. Today’s picture is all about a party with great friends, thanks to a post I was tagged in on Facebook a couple hours ago. These three ladies have been my best friends for…well, forever, and I can’t imagine not having them to talk to and laugh with, even if we no longer talk to or laugh with each other as often as we used to do. Growing up has a way of making that happen, it seems. And yet, on those rare occasions when we do get together, it’s as if nothing has changed.

Gotta love it.

I hope you all have a happy Friday and a fantastic weekend! Don’t forget to see what Charnele’s got posted for this week’s prompt!

Photo 365 #28

September 4, 20144 Comments

Among other things, our holiday weekend involved a trip to Spook Cave:

spookcave

It was a lot of fun, except for the part where you had to bend over till your nose met your knees for half the ride. Still, we had a good tour guide and a lot of fun.

Photo 365 #26

September 2, 20146 Comments

Yes, it’s another picture from our weekend trip up north. It’s one of the trails at Effigy Mounds National Monument.

This could make a pretty book cover. Hope you’re all having a happy Tuesday!

Photo 365 #25

September 1, 2014Leave a comment

This is a portion of the Great Bear Mound at Effigy Mounds National Monument. Though the mounds have settled over the centuries, this one was still too big to fit in the frame.

I love the way the shadows play out in this picture. I didn’t really notice them when I took it – I was more concerned with getting a picture of the mound at the time – but the more I look at it (and the one I took after this), the more I like it. It’s like looking at the clouds on a summer afternoon and trying to put a name to the shapes they form.

I see a stag in these shadows. What do you see?

Photo 365 #24

August 31, 2014January 12, 20152 Comments

We took the kids to see Effigy Mounds today. This was the view from Fire Point:

It was a beautiful day on the Mississippi River.

Photo 365 #22: The beginning and the end

August 29, 2014September 1, 20142 Comments

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. -Seneca

This post has been percolating for a good week now. Last Wednesday, I attended my great-aunt Janice‘s funeral with a heavy heart. She passed away the morning of August 17, after years of battling an assortment of health problems.

Wednesday, August 20, was her 66th wedding anniversary.

Her husband, my grandma’s brother, Calvin, is still living, and I couldn’t help thinking that burying your wife was a hell of a way to spend your anniversary. And despite Aunt Janice’s stated wish that we celebrate her life instead of mourning her death, there was a fair bit of mourning going on. She was a wonderful lady, after all, and we miss her greatly.

It was a lovely funeral – their whole family turned up to see her off to eternity, which is saying something because they had four children still living in addition to 18 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren. It’s been so long since I’ve seen some of those cousins that I couldn’t put names to faces – name tags would have been a huge help. 🙂 It was great fun visiting with them all again, but I wish the circumstances for the reunion could have been different.

Martha Stahl The strangeness of life’s ebbs and flows haunted me…

Photo 365 #21

August 28, 20144 Comments

Can you believe I’ve been at this for three whole weeks already? Neither can I.

Anyway, I was struggling to come up with a good idea for today’s photo post. But after I put the boys down for their nap, I went out to check the mail. Hidden among the various bills and other junk mail was this:

hpfan

Last (school) year, Bubbles’ class did a project where they wrote a letter to their favorite authors. At first, Bubbles wanted to write to me (cuz he’s a sweet boy), but his teacher told him that he had to choose another author, so he chose JK Rowling (big Harry Potter fans, we are). I’d actually kind of forgotten about it till today.

I suspect that when he gets home, he’ll be a mite disappointed. I mean, how cool would it have been to get a letter back from JK Rowling? Still, even this returned letter will be a nice keepsake. Someday he can look back at it and have a glimpse of the boy he used to be, a carefree, happy boy who loved football and reading.

And who knows? Perhaps someday I’ll get to go to a conference or convention of some awesome sort and I’ll bump into her and not make a fool of myself when recounting this story, and maybe he’ll get his return letter then.

What? It could happen. 🙂