December

We've had a big month here just as all of you have as well. We kicked off the holiday season with a Deseret Strings concert at the St. George Tabernacle. It was a beautiful program, and our second year performing with the group.

We continued with a band performance at the middle school where Brett did fabulously!



We celebrated Mom's 60th birthday mid month with an awesome party.




Gram even came down for the festivities, aren't they gorgeous?



We then rounded our the school performances with Colbly's kindergarten Christmas Program where he played on of the drummers drumming. P.S. We LOVE our teacher this year and pray she will stay until the Bon Bon goes to Kinder!

Cousin's camp this year was a whirlwind. We silk screened the t-shirts this year which was really fun. We started by making lunches to had out to the homeless and then delivered the things the kids purchased with the money they got for Christmas from Grandie and Gramps to the Shade Tree Shelter, where we were able to tour the facility. After passing out the lunches we made we headed back to the house for pizza and a dollar store gift exchange, which in my opinion is way better than a real gift exchange!! The kids were a blast to watch.



Christmas eve was spent out in Logandale where we played games and ate Lumpia, a Christmas eve tradition. Christmas morning began at about 6:00 and passed in a blur, I have like a total of 6 pictures from the morning and non with Brett in them. Next year the kids are not allowed to get up before the light is good enough to take decent pictures!! Electronics was the name of the game from Santa this year. Brett got a Nintendo DSi and Sam and Ipod nano, Colby rounded out the bunch with a new Nintendo DS.


Bonnie was the funnest this Christmas with her new princess dresses. She got 6 new dress up dresses but only wants the Cinderella (Grella) dress. She wears it all day long. Always looking for her glass slipper (gas swipper)


We had a wonderful Christmas this year and are looking forward to a wonderful eventful year next year!

serioulsy?

Has it really been a month since I last blogged!! This is for you my dear Maddie who had "gently" urged me to get back on the wagon and update this thing. So as you all see I completely blew the whole picture a day for all of November. I just look at it as a trial run for next year, I am working on a project with my photo peeps. It's a photo a day for the whole year. It is a big undertaking but I hope to do it to really capture our life through pictures.WAAAYYY back in November we had a little recital at our home for our kids to show off their mad skills to all the fam!! They all worked really hard to be ready to play and they all did amazing, I would have a video but my video turned out really dark (i should have shot in night vision, that wouldn't have been to freaky would it?) Anyway we had a great dinner followed by beautiful music.


We spent Thanksgiving it Oregon and I took a total of 5 pictures (not including the family pictures I took) and here they are.








I did do family shoots for my big brothers and their families, and I must say that it is unreal the amount of attractiveness we have in this family!!








When taking the Mitch fam pictures he kept making faces and I told him that if he kept it up they would make it on my blog, so there you go dude!!







I also managed to snap a few of my own kiddos for our Christmas cards!! If you haven't got yours yet leave me your address and I'll drop it in the mail!!



Thanks to Shannon for helping out to get one with all of us!!


So there you have it, a some what of an update though it doesn't even touch all of the things we have been up to for the last month, Maybe I'll blog the rest next month!!

11.07.2009


11.08.2009

11.09.2009



11.10.2009

Photo.A.Day

11.03.2009



11.04.2009


11.05.2009


11.06.2009

Don't my booys have goofy grins!!

photo.a.day.november.2009

I have made a goal to take one picture a day for the entire month of November. If you don't like lookin and pictures of my kids you may want to check back in a month!! Here goes...

11.01.2009



11.02.2009

dumont.2009.

Love Dumont. Especially on Halloween weekend. Dirty faces. Boogery noses. Sand in every nook and cranny.








Sleepy babies loving on daddies.



Gorgeous girls in Rhinos


and in shades.






Cute boys raging on rides.

Lovin on babies.

Grams

After talking to my mom and hearing that Grammy was in need of some contact, i decided to take advantage of the fact that Terry and Brett would be gone on a campout, and head up to Hurricane, UT to stay with Gram for a night. It was a really quick trip, less than 24 hours, but I am so glad we did. The kids had fun loving up Gram and she did too!

Grammy has swings out her back porchand the kids couldn't wait to get dressed in the morning to jump on those swings.

We spent Saturday afternoon at the park with my cousin Lisa's kids and Aunt Patti. It was really fun to visit with them.

Bonnie liked digging in the dirt at the horseshoe pits.

Colby thinks he's pretty hot stuff with his monkey bars ability!!

because I must

I must blog simply because I have the cutest boy EVER! I dare you to disagree. His smile and luvs get me through the days, especially when things are rough, he just knows when I need a hug!

blue

Remind me to send a thank you note to my Visiting Teachers for the container of Halloween candy!

punkin' patch

Colby had his first field trip in kindergarten today. Mrs. Cefelli's class along with a few others traveled on the bus to the Gilcrease Orchards. Very exciting for Colby, he couldn't get over no seat belt which is interesting because I can never get him to wear his in the car! Each of the kids got to pick out there very own pumpkin. They also got to have a bottle of fresh apple cider and then we went on a tour of the apple press where they make the the apple cider. I understand it is very delicious, I didn't get to try any because Colby and Bonnie drank it all!

Colby picked the biggest pumpkin he could find, thankfully CJ's mom had a wagon so we didn't have to cart it all around the place! It was a very blustery morning and Bonnie wasn't liking it, she kept grabbing my face and saying "bak-in-a-car MOM"



It was a fun day and I think I we will have to make another trip to pick our pumpkins for carving this Halloween.

Complete!

It has taken quite sometime but it is finally done. Thanks to the man in my life for sacrificing an entire Saturday to finish building it and helping my vision come to light. It all began when I saw in my Pottery Barn catalog, the solution to my disorganization problems. You see, I kinda have a little bit of scatterbrainedness (it's totally a word) when it comes to things like papers to sign, appointments to remember and who needs to be where, when! Well the beautiful Pottery Barn version was a whopping $600 or more so I kissed the idea goodbye, that is until I was blog hopping and saw Sara's version, that she did without and manly help (I want to be her when I grow up, power tools scare me) So I knew what I wanted but not a clue as to how to do it! So I enlisted my manly man of a husband to help with the power tools part and viola here you have my fabulous Message Center. The whole thing is about 4 and a half feet square. Each square is aprox. 12 inches. There is peg board, chalk board, white board, steel board for magnets, fabric padded boards and corkboard. I used my bag-o-vinyl scraps that Shannon gave to me to add my kids names and days of the week so I can remember when scouts is because for the life of me I can never remember!! I also made a re-usable calender on one of the whiteboard squares, just squares of vinyl and days of the week, so i can erase each month and write in a new month! I couldn't be happier with how it turned out and I haven't forgotten scouts or Activity days since!!

Before and After

I have been getting a lot of e-mails and questions about photography lately, which I find HILARIOUS because I only pretend to know what I am doing. I have taken classes and read numerous books on photography so I can kinda play like I know what I am talking about. One of the many questions I get is "What kind of editing do you do to your pictures?" There was a time, and if you go way back in my archives, you will find i did a lot of editing to my pictures, trying to make my pictures look better, I was never happy even after all of the fiddling I did with photoshop. It wasn't until I found out how to capture my images correctly "in camera" that I began to see the results I wanted. In the following image you will see my sooc (straight out of camera) image with a little bit of sharpening for web on the left and the edited image on the right. Now what exactly did I do to this image? I always start off with a defog (just a "pre-sharpen") then I just did a bit of a boost in the contrast and color balance to fix the redness in Sam's skin, and I bit of sharpening on the eyes to give them some sparkle then I just resized and sharpened for web. It took me all of about 1 min to edit and I am really happy with the results. Now this is my process for most of my pictures here on the blog, OR LESS (my mother of all posts a few posts down was all pretty much sooc) Now for my clients I do a bit more like skin smoothing and adding a vignette or maybe some fancy schmancy vintage action!

BTW---I'm thinking of submitting this (and some others) to the Gap Casting call!! Whatcha think? Are my kids cute enough, I think so but then again I may be a bit biased!