Failed family pictures

We went out to take family pictures tonight. After trying to get 6 people to coordinate, dressing sweaty soccer playing kids and bribing everyone to be nice, the sun was almost down. I also found out my tripod is broken.

If only I could learn to jump in the picture in the right place and fix Grace's hat at the same time.

The fam in front of Lake Iola. Brian looks so excited.


So I opted to spend the last few minutes taking individual shots- they are much easier.
Luckily, I am visiting my sister in a few weeks and I am sure if I buy her a case of DDP I can bribe her into taking my family pictures.
http://annadelephotography.blogspot.com/

the clean part of the house and some sillies

Some boring pictures of our house (only the clean part.)

The front door and stair case to the loft.

Really cool fans and some incredibly high pot lights. One light just burnt out and I am going to figure out how to change something 40 ft in the air.

The master bedroom.

Kitchen #1, the counters are blue. Crazy, I know. I am not really loving them so much.
Kitchen #2 is not very clean today. At least I can look at kitchen #1 and pretend I have a clean kitchen.

The living room, the doors go to the patio. There are patio doors in the master bedroom and kitchen #2, too.

The view from the loft. We need a rug, a coffee table, end tables, something over the fire place, lamps and stuff.
This is the end of the clean part of the house, I let the kids in the other part.
Now on to something more interesting.

Sillies- pose #1.

Sillies- pose #2.

A picture that I love

I was browsing through last months photos, when I stumbled on this picture.
It may be one of my favorites-ever. Sure Adam has a grimy face, but that is what he usually looks like. I love it because you can see that Grace adores Adam. I also love that Adam's fingers are so busy holding food and a blade of grass, his little fingers are always busy. I love the light and the tree filtered bokeh. All in all this picture makes me smile.

Boys and the house

The boys were feeling a little left out, here they are in September.

No fancy-schmancy clothes, just Jacob.

Adam, complete with rice crispy treat.

Our cute little house. Not so crazy about the amount of blue. The best part is that it is really like 2 houses glued together so I can shut myself in one part and the kids can destroy the other. Very convenient for my sanity.

So here is what I want it to look like. More yellow and cheery, maybe a red door and a tin roof. Fatter columns with more details and some shutters and rocking chairs. I guess I should have put in some plants.

While I am changing things. Here is me in my sports car, blonde hair, fake body parts, spray tan and a nose job. It is totally realistic except the purple. I really do not wear purple. Here is to dreaming.

What life is really like at our house after school. We have a couple of plasma scooters that the kids take to the top of the drive way and ride down. Road rash is pretty common at our house.

I finally got the camera out tonight to take some pictures of the girls.

Grace posed for about 30 seconds for pictures until she realized there were fire ants.

Pretty Merry lasted a few minutes longer.

Toothless Merry

Both of Merry's front teeth have fallen out and I have been meaning to take a picture of her before her big teeth arrive. After the move, unpacking, visitors I finally got the camera out. Here is sweet, toothless Merry in our front field.

A visit from Papa

Papa stopped in for a short visit en route to some meetings on the other side of Florida. Luckily we still made it on his travel circuit. He gave us a minneola tangelo tree and valencia orange tree as a house warming gift. Brian planted the trees while I took the kids for a swim. He was so excited it did not take him a pick axe and 4 hrs to dig a tree-size hole like it does in Texas. We also ate some BBQ and played Settlers of Catan (Jacob loves this game and wants to play anytime we have visitors.) I have been spoiled to have 3 weekends of visitors.

Papa and the kids ready for church.

One day when I finally organize my stuff, I will start taking house pictures. This is our entryway, the stair case leads up to a loft that over looks the living room. At first, I was going to make the loft the toy room, but Adam and the open staircase are not a good combination. I was also pretty sure that toys and kids would eventually come flying over the balcony, so the loft became the office/craft space/ extra, extra guest room/ catch-all space. So a picture will probably never be taken of that room.

Grace carries the recessive genes for tongue rolling.

Grace has finally grown a couple of inches. She has always been in the 10th percentile for height and compared to Merry who has always been in the 90th percentile, she looks tiny. She loves to make people laugh and is always dressing up for Merry and Jacob's entertainment. Today she wore a unicorn costume and danced around then came and told us that "unicorns eat corn when they are hungry." Make perfect sense to me.