Happy Halloween

Winter, spring, summer or faaaall. All you've got to do is caaall. Rosie was the mastermind behind the costumes this year. Pretty proud of our clever girl! Too bad it was 40 degrees when we went to Boo at the Zoo last night and we had to cover up all that cuteness.

bat boy and his last first holiday

a new tradition?

We did this last year when I was so very, very pregnant. The girls were dearly wishing to go camping. And I just couldn't. We compromised by making their favorite parts of camping happen. And they remembered! As soon as fall weather hit they've been asking, does 2 years in a row a tradition make? Campfire with hotdogs(a super huge, very rare treat around here) and smores. I can get behind a tradition that involves me throwing a bag of chips at kids and handing off cooking duties to Daddy.  How often does it happen that Mama has zilch to do? Good times. The only hiccup? Evie was very fussy this year. She couldn't get anything to her liking except maybe the amount of mustard she used.

ewww pumpkin guts

I can't believe I don't have images of the final products. Seems I need to make a trip to the front porch this evening! I used Fletchers hand as a template for my pumpkins eyes. It was quite amusing that he thought the he scraps were to eat. Maybe I need to make the boy some pumpkin bread?  The girls were soooo funny this year.... lots of squeals and squeamishness.

book pages

After the great hard drive crash of 2012, I realized how important it was to get stuff off the computer and into our home. Recent vacation pictures seemed an easy place to start. I have close to 20,000 images from years past and quite frankly I don't even know where to begin with those. Vacation album is easy though, right? I can't decide if I want to leave them as is or add some elements. I used a new to to make these - a script compositer. Easy peasy. You add the pic you want on one page and it shows you any and all possible layouts. I tried using some of the online album makers but the lack of control was frustrating. I am not very good at digital scraping, the tools make it too easy to never ever finish a page. Glue and scissors tend to make your decision for you. When it's glued, it's glued, right? So that's why I am sticking with the simple modern approach ... so it will get done and printed! And I'm trying to let go. I even shot half of these with some presets in camera and then didn't touch them in photoshop. Are they perfect? No. But an imperfect album is better than none.

Family Vacation

I'm working really hard on getting theses into an album so I'm not going to post a whole bunch now. I think you can usually share the albums when they are done? We'll see....
We decided to mix things up this year and went to the NC coast. Meh. We only had 4 days b/c of Nate's terrible vacation day policy but it was still nice to sneak away. We didn't think we were going to be able to so that only made it that much sweeter. We packed a lot in, visiting the beach, an aquarium, hunting for Venus Fly Traps, pool time and a fun ferry ride.
My favorite part was watching Fletcher walk on the sand. Take two steps, fall down, get back up and continue.