Polaroids from my In-laws!

My In-laws love the idea of me starting film photography and they've happily shown me all the film cameras, old pictures, and polaroids they can find.  I love it!  At Christmas they showed me these old polaroids they took back before (I think) my husband was born.  Not sure about that one though.  Don't you just love the colors!  They still look like this, btw.  My father-in-law has just started growing his mustache back and it looks great on him!  He told me that the suit he is wearing in the first and last pictures was what he wore to work everyday!  That's awesome!

Aren't they sweet?  You can tell how much they love each other!

Hope your New Year is starting off well!  I'll be back later with some goals (not resolutions) I have for this next year!

Happy Halloween 2010...

We took the girls out trick or treating this evening.  We had the best time!  I'm tempted to say that I had more fun than anyone, but I'm not sure that's true.  They looked so incredibly adorable I just wanted to keep giving them hugs and taking pictures.  Katie was a fairy princess and Ava was a butterfly.  The very first house we went to Ava got a piece of candy and I'm not kidding when I say that it took us about 15 minutes to get to the next house.  She was so thrilled that someone just gave her a piece of candy all she wanted to do was eat it.  And eat it she did.  She actually set down her bucket and kept walking without it.  Who needs to carry around this thing if you can just eat the candy as it's given to you?  Haha!  Katie wanted to get to as many houses as she could and fill up her pumpkin to its eyeballs.

We had a wonderful Halloween evening!

A Fall Day...

We went outside yesterday after dinner to rake up some leaves and I spent most of the time (ok all of the time) photographing the girls playing in the leaves.  They had so much fun!  I love watching them enjoying life.  I am no pro photographer so most of the pictures turned out really blurry.  I should have bumped up the ISO but I didn't think of that until after the fact, of course.  But blurry and all, the pictures are really fun to look at!  Here is Ava being the victim of an older sibling's fun.  Poor thing.  Katie just kept on pouring leaves on top of her.  So funny though!

She has no idea what's coming...

This was after the first five leaf pours...

From the top!

From the side!

Ewww!  Leaves in the mouth!

Katie was relentless.  Just in case you were wondering I did make her stop after a couple minutes.  Otherwise she would still be at it!

Here are a couple more pictures I took of the girls.  The one of Ava is really good (if I do say so myself) and I LOVE it!  I want to print it out in a huge poster size!  

My sweet little angels...

My budding artist...

Recently I have been discovering how artistically inclined my oldest daughter is.  Homeschooling has really opened my eyes to how she learns and what her strengths and weaknesses are.  I have started her with Sonlight Curriculum, which I love because of how mapped out everything is for the teacher (me), but she is not thriving with it because it is very language oriented and she is very visually oriented.  So I've shifted my focus in her schooling to incorporate more visual activities (drawing, painting, photography, picture books, etc.).  Since I have spent more time with her visual side her creativity has just blossomed!  Here are some paintings she made this afternoon that I just LOVE!  They are so colorful and creative!  Can you tell what's on her mind?  She can't stop talking about Santa Claus and Christmas and snow.  She can't wait for the holidays to get here!

Here is a snowman:

Here is another snowman with large snowflakes falling:

Here is a picture of Katie and Ava playing in the snow together and holding hands:

Oh so sweet!