My "Cooperative" Family

Once a year I gather the 5 of us up and try to take pictures for our Christmas card.  And to be honest, I don't make it too big of a deal.  I take the pics myself, so there's no photographer to have to deal with, and I do it on this trail right behind our house.  So, come November I just wait around for the weather and lighting conditions to be okay, and then give Josh a heads-up that it's coming.  Low key, right?  

Well...apparently my husband hates taking pictures.  His Mom assured me he's done this forever, and his sour expression in no way implies that he's ready to cut ties with the family and run for the hills.  Josh kept dragging his feet to start getting dressed, even after I had the kids and myself ready....and I was trying to beat the imminent cold front!  It was less than an hour away!!!  This coupled with the major tiff we had over the creative direction of the photo shoot (seating options, shoes, standing vs. sitting)...oh yeah.  Josh looked thrilled to be there.  And since when does Josh get to be creative director for anything regarding pictures???

In addition to the fun I was having with Josh...I had waited on Meredith to wake up from her nap, figuring she'd be ready to go, but she apparently just wanted to run around and pick up rocks.  Sitting for pictures wasn't on her list of things to do today.  She eventually cooperated though.  

And Wallace...he stared at his shoes for most of it.  Ha!  Good grief.  At least Anna was on board.  

Look what a happy camper!  Ha! At this point all 3 kids were running away from us down the trail.

And my cooperative angel.  

Oh yeah...she was fun.

She would go from limp noodle to planking.

He finally gave up.

I think we managed to get a keeper.  I'll have to let Josh pick which one will go on the card later I guess...since he only smiled in one, and that may have just been a grimmace.  Anyway...glad my family doesn't have to have these meltdowns in front of anyone else.  We just do this for our very own entertainment.  :)

Cropping helps!  ;)

Anna wanted a little photo session before we went back inside. :)

Anyway.  2 out of 5 isn't bad on a Christmas card...right?  Oh well...  I assume this 15 minutes of sitting for photos will always be a struggle.  It's hard to get all 5 of us dressed up and awake and happy all at the same time.  At least the outtakes are funny! :)

Thanksgiving at Eric's

We get 2 Thanksgivings this year!  The one today at Eric's and another tomorrow in Blanco!  Yay!  So much turkey.  :)  

So, what do you do when it's November in Texas?

Play in the swimming pool, of course!  :)  She ended up completed soaked...

Wallace just stripped.

Supposedly we're about to get a cold front...  We'll see.

Eric has a karaoke machine!  

I'm a little surprised that Wallace liked it so much.  All he would do was count, but still!  Maybe he's not as much of an introvert as I thought.

Sarah Faye treated us to some Vanilla Ice.  :)

Eric's shuffleboard is also very popular! Who doesn't love shuffleboard?

Wallace just liked playing with the sand.

I feel like I've known Valerie and her girls for years now.  I met her girls when they were so young!  One was asleep when we took this pic...  Tryptophan.  ;)

I think I've figured out how to get Wallace to eat....put food on a stick!  He sat here and chowed down, and so Josh put some ham on stick, and he ate it too!

Anna took some pictures again today.  I usually put the camera on all auto for her, but the dim lighting from the cloudy day made that impossible today.  So, I ended up leaving it on manual and just took the camera off back button autofocus, which means she needed to get whatever she wanted in focus in the little box in the view finder.  She got some cute pics.  Adults are a lot more willing to ham it up for a kid with a camera.  :)  These next two are hers.

Thank goodness he wasn't shooting the bird!  ;)  And way to use the rule of thirds, Anna!

Woohoo! Let's do it all again tomorrow!!

Cute Pics from Blanco Today

It's Josh's birthday (his 40th, so kind of a big deal!).  Big Mama and Joe-Joe came to town for Thanksgiving early and got us some BBQ.  On a side note, I think I may have been spelling Big Mama wrong for years now.  "/  I happened to put one of the kids in their Alaska shirt recently (she and Joe had matching shirts made for all of us which had all of our names on the back), and saw out of the corner of my eye that it's spelled as I've written here...not as I've been writing it forever!!!  Sorry Big Mama.  How annoying of me.  

Anyway.  Although it was crazy windy, the weather was super nice and so different from the never-ending heat we've had since July.  So, we spent most of our time in Blanco today outside.  :)

He was pretty wind-blown.  :)

We spent a lot of time looking for rocks...

And throwing rocks...

Anna asked to take some pics, and she did a great job!  The rest of the ones here are hers.

sssssssssss

I may be getting old and wrinkly...but at least my teeth look awesome!  ;)

I thought this one was especially cute!  She carries this basket around a lot, it's one of her many prized possessions.  

Veteran's Day

So, I got the day off!  But my kids didn't.  This actually ended up working out quite nicely!  Anna had a program up at school this morning, and I got to go to it!  How exciting!  I also got to take her lunch again, which was just awesome.  

I got there with enough time to snap some shots of Anna after her class came in and sat down.

Ugh.  She's not in focus.  Stupid striped shirt behind her, and stupid D7000 with only 39 focus points!  I just need to make sure she's wearing a striped shirt from now on for stuff like this.  Anyway, this kind of cracked me up and reminded me of when I was in elementary and they would cram us all in there criss-cross applesauce, and then yell "MOVE BACK" like a hundred times so they could jam another row of students down in front.  

So this was my view of her performance.  :(  I was craning to get that good of a view.  Must get there earlier next time!

I half stood up to get a slightly better pic.  They sang America the Beautiful and flapped these plates around.  It was cute.

And out of fear that everything was out of focus, I snapped another pic of her before I left.  :) 

I didn't get any pictures at lunch, and it was the craziest day for me schedule-wise.  I was up at the school at 9:00 for the program, then back up there at 11:15 for lunch, then back again at 12:40 for early dismissal.  I should have just stayed up there all day.  Ha!  At least Josh dropped  her off for me this morning.

Momma's got a new Computer!

So, it finally happened.  The computer that Josh and I built the month before our wedding crapped out.  :(  I still remember the night we put it together, so watching it die has been so sad.  The poor thing just got slower and slower and slower.  And fewer and fewer of the USBs would work on it, until finally none of them worked, and I couldn't even log in.  That coupled with the final  marathon editing session I had on it one evening caused me to go crying to Josh that I couldn't take it anymore.  I decided against a Mac since I never use one and feel rather stupid every time I try to use anyone else's.  A couple of my buddies who have them at home, and not at work, tend to be pretty frustrated by them as well.  So, I decided to build a PC.  Well...not me.  I took a stab at selecting components and sent them over to a computer guru that my Mom knows just to make sure they would all jive, and he assured me that what I was thinking of buying would be an insane amount of overkill.  So, I took his advice and asked him to build it, and voila!  Almost done.  ;)  One of my memory chips is faulty, so I'm currently "limping" along with only 8Gs of memory.  This is such a vast improvement from where I was that I think the full 16Gs will blow my mind once I get the new chip installed!  Anyway...enough about all that!  

The past two months haven't been too crazy, but some fun things have happened.  

Wallace wrote on the Expedition with a red sharpie!  It was all over 3 sides of it.  Thank goodness it was dirty and the grime killed the sharpie before he could do even more damage.  This kid....  And, yes...I managed to get the sharpie off.  :)

Anna's in fall t-ball.  This might sound bad, but I kind of nudged her toward this over soccer.  Geez, I just hate soccer....

Her first night game!  Oh...and #7 is Anna's doppelganger...but he's a boy, so that's a little awkward.  ;)

Still working on my flare.  I've got a ways to go, but Anna's night game gave me a couple of opportunities. 

I know it looks like she's totally whiffing, but this was a practice swing.  :)

Anna and I went to the Wildlife Ranch with Sarah Faye and her kids.  It was a lot of fun!  They have sooooo many giraffes there!

Look how close you could get to them!

There was also a "safari".  I didn't realize what we were going to be doing at the Wildlife Ranch.   I hadn't googled it at all.  So, when I realized it was a safari I was pretty pumped!

The safari was hilarious.  It was a giant traffic jam!  And even though they tell you not to feed the animals by hand, they are so flippin tame....

I mean this guy has it made.  Just lay here by the road and people throw pellets all day long.  He doesn't even need to stand up.  Ha!

There were some idiots there.  I'm sure this sign was necessitated by one of them back in the day.  

It got a little crazy around the ostriches.  They are fairly close to the end, and people's road-rage tendencies were starting to flare by this point...which was just plain stupid because the animals were so tame they were all walking in among the cars and forcing them to pretty much stop and wait.

Can you see the pellet flying through the air toward its face?  It actually caught many of these!

One of Sarah's boys noticed how much their antlers resembled a rainbow.  :)

Anyway...Wildlife Ranch...lots of fun.  I recommend it, but be sure to budget like 2 hours for the safari, and leave your road rage at home!

And then there's Halloween!  No more preschool parades for Anna...

but hommie's still in it!  

Last year was the year of Elsa's at the preschool parade. 

This was the year of crying preschoolers!  It was like one started wailing and then pretty soon 2 classes were in tears.  Ha!

Poor Spidey...  :(

I continue to crash and burn at getting good pics of all 3 kids at once.  

And I did not realize how much Meredith would look like a boy in her Indian costume.  Probably should have waited until she had enough hair for a pony tail before trying out something like this.  Ha!

I put some LED lights around each of the kids, and I think I'm going to do this every year.  It made it so much easier to spot them while they were trick or treating!

And...as all of our mutual friends already know, Jen came to Texas!!!  She already did a blog about how we did our trip to Fredericksburg (which quite frankly was way more fun than I thought it would be...I was a little worried it might be sort of a stiff/dull trip...not so much...), but I thought I would share a few more of our selfies from the trip.  She was nice and didn't share the outtakes, but we each got copies of the pics, and many of them were just too funny.  :)  Sorry Jen.  

Let's do this chronologically...

The day started out well enough.  :)

Stop 2...  

he he he...  :)  Good grief 6 wine tastings per vineyard, and a roadie with each one....We were doomed.

Stop 3...We were getting braver with our selfies.  We straight up set our tripod up in front of a lot of people.  Anyone who knows me and Jen knows that would not have happened under typical circumstances.

Last vineyard of the day....

I'm surprised my teeth aren't purple.

I'm so glad we did our selfie-vineyard trip!  Even more glad I decided to go ahead and take the next day off work.  ;)

Well, needless to say, I'm so excited to have a computer again!  Thanks for getting me squared away with it all Andrew!  So glad you accept payment in the form of cookies!