Photo 365 #117

December 2, 2014December 3, 2014Leave a comment

Who doesn’t love Christmas cookies? Well, me. At least at the beginning of December, anyway.

My church and my kids’ 4-H club like scheduling their Christmas cookie walks right next to each other. I think last year, they might have been the same weekend, but this year, they’re separated by a week. I’m sure this is completely unintentional, but it makes for a very long day of baking. After all, 27 dozen is a heck of a lot of cookies.

Anyway.

I kind of forgot about the church cookie walk this year, so by the time I found the letter about it, it was too late to just give money and let someone else do the baking. The cookie walk is this Saturday and, since today is the only free day I have between now and then, I decided to get those cookies knocked out bright and early.

Cookie fail.

Mmm, meringue…

Cricket decided he wanted to help…

Photo 365 #115

November 30, 2014December 1, 20146 Comments

One of my favorite pastimes is reading. I know, big surprise. 🙂 But seriously, I love books. And I love to read, to myself and to my kids. It’s the best way I know to pass on my passion for books.

The best part? It works.

Here’s Thumper reading George and Martha by James Marshall. I loved his books when I was little, and I’ve read them to each of my kids. This particular book is an omnibus edition of all the George and Martha stories, which I’d never seen before. Our last trip to the library yielded not only this treasure, but also James Marshall’s retelling of The Three Bears and a stack of Tomie dePaola books, another author I loved as a kid.

What were some of your favorite childhood books? Favorite authors? Share ’em down below!

Photo 365 #114

November 29, 201410 Comments

sb2 Nothing today has been what I expected. I’d expected to get a whole bunch of laundry done and put away. I’d expected to get some more work done on my revisions. I’d even hoped to get a new photo editing program installed on my computer and maybe, if I was really lucky, go to the UNI play-off game with the family tonight.

But as the old saying goes, I plan and God laughs.

Instead, I was up half of last night with an out-of-sorts Thumper. Bubbles and Miss Tadpole assisted in trying to calm him down the first time, as they weren’t yet in bed, which left me feeling all sorts of warm and fuzzy. Then today, I spent the day waging war against a particularly stubborn migraine, which still hasn’t subsided. (Grrr.) Once again, it was Bubbles and Miss Tadpole to the rescue – they kept an eye on the boys when my medicine made me sleepy and did their chores without argument. Once again, I felt all sorts of warm and fuzzy. 🙂

Despite having searched high and low for someone to watch the boys so we could go to the game tonight, I didn’t get to go to the game. Everyone was busy, and by the time we thought to just buy the boys their own tickets, the game had sold out. But since I’m still not feeling that well, I didn’t mind too much.

As we headed up to meet Seymour so he could take the kids to the game, Thumper conked out in the car. He hasn’t napped in two days, so I worried that he’d wake up as soon as we got home and then not go back to sleep at bedtime. Surprisingly enough, he didn’t wake up when we got home. His eyes fluttered open for a minute while I took his coat off, but he went right back to sleep. I took this picture in the parking lot before we headed home – I just loved the lighting in it. He looks like he hasn’t a care in the world, and I hope he holds onto that peace for a long, long time.

All these things have left me feeling particularly blessed – after all, you can’t know joy without sadness. What things – or people – make you feel blessed?

Photo 365 #113: Triumph

November 28, 2014Leave a comment

I had a great picture in mind for this challenge. It’s a picture of Bubbles when he was little, having made it through the tube on the playground. He emerged from it feeling victorious, and reached to the sky in joy.

Or at least that’s how I remembered the picture.

I dug it out of my external hard drive this morning and discovered that his expression was a little less triumphant than I remembered. Okay, a lot less triumphant – it looked like he was about to cry.

Well, so much for feeling victorious.

“Come here you…stubborn…apple!”

“Mmm, apples!”

But then I ran across these pictures. When he was little, we used to go apple picking at a local orchard every fall. Most of the trees were too tall for him to reach, but there was this one that had some particularly low-hanging fruit. He was determined to help us pick apples, so he went over and immediately began tugging on a beautiful red apple.

It put up quite a fight, but he was victorious in the end. Triumph never tasted so sweet. 🙂

Photo 365 #112: Double

November 27, 2014November 26, 20148 Comments

Don’t let these sleepy expressions fool you:

sleepy

These guys are double trouble. What one doesn’t think of, the other one does.

Photo 365 #111: Edge

November 26, 2014Leave a comment

If the following picture seems familiar, it’s because you’ve likely seen it before in sepia:

edge

I took this picture back in 2007. I was doing someone’s senior pictures, and I couldn’t help taking a few shots of this bridge for myself. It’s an old railroad bridge spanning the Iowa River, but it hasn’t been used for trains in I don’t know how long. I have a deep and abiding love for the relics of my state’s history, a bit of which you can read about here.

How about you – what are some of your old loves?

Photo 365 #110: Glass

November 25, 20146 Comments

Seymour has given me some lovely gifts in the time that we’ve known each other. This is a detail photo of one of those gifts:

bowldetail

For our second anniversary, he bought me a beautiful glass bowl from a local shop, and its beauty never fails to impress me. The glass contains ash from the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which appeals to my love of history. It’s just a beautiful bowl, and one of the prettiest pieces of glass I’ve seen outside of a church.

I spent probably a good half hour taking pictures of this bowl back in May as we were packing up to move. I played with angles, lighting, zooming in and out…In short, I spent way too much time photographing this bowl when I should have been packing. Let’s face it – no one likes packing, and taking pretty pictures is much more fun. I love the texture and color of this photograph almost as much as I love the bowl itself, and the thought that Seymour puts into gift-giving (regardless of who the recipient is).

It’s a perfect reminder of the things I treasure in life. Do you have something like that, a reminder of things you hold precious? Tell me all about it in the comments!

Photo 365 #109: Treasure

November 24, 201410 Comments

What do I treasure? Well, I treasure many things, but of all the things I treasure, my family is most important:

family

This is from our annual summer gathering on my mother-in-law’s side of the family. While this isn’t everyone, it is the picture in which my children were at least all looking in the direction of the camera, even if they weren’t all smiling. I love my family, and am blessed to have married into such a wonderful one.

What do you treasure?

Photo 365 #108

November 23, 2014November 23, 20146 Comments

Well, this post is later than I’d intended. I spent the morning moving a pile of lumber from one outbuilding to another as part of a farm clean-up effort. I had two adorable little helpers, though Thumper petered out after about five minutes.

Cricket, though? He was a fantastic helper. He didn’t quit till the job was done, and what a big job it was.

We were expecting rain this afternoon, but it showed up early, just as we were getting started on our project. By the time we finished, we were all soaked to the bone. But the rain really made our one apple tree stand out, and I couldn’t help taking a picture or four. I love the way the colors pop in this picture, a bit of variety on an otherwise gray and dreary day.

Photo 365 #107

November 22, 2014Leave a comment

reindeerbunny Because it’s that time of year, and because I can’t find half the kids’ winter things after moving this past spring, we bought the boys some new mittens last week. Thumper’s mittens came with a hat.