Here's to Fall

Today is the last "official" day of summer vacation for Ron. Tomorrow he reports back to work, and I know everyone is rolling their eyes a little thinking of how good he has it as a teacher, regarding the 3 month vacation he gets every year. Yeah, well, it is pretty nice. I could say something like, "well, the price he has to pay for the 3 month break is the fact that he deals with 150 teenagers every day.." etc. etc. but he actually loves his job and is good at it. I am glad I married a high school teacher. True story: part of me thought that someday I might marry a teacher. You think I am making that up in hindsight? Nope. And now that I have, I realize that either I must be subconsciously psychic or just knew at a young age what I wanted. Or I just got lucky. The fact that he is a teacher is a huge contributing factor in my photography business being possible too.

Anyway, this cooler summer weather is a welcome treat in my book. I even wore a sweater for part of the day yesterday! Usually our fall is so short you can barely enjoy it before we're buried under 4 feet of snow... maybe this year we will get an extended version. I'm okay with that. Bring on the pretty leaves!!!

Little Helper

I have been so busy these days with sessions and editing, I feel like I constantly need to be working on pictures... and to be honest, I am excited to be going into a week-long stretch of no sessions! I can get caught up on editing at night (and a little during the day, I can't help it), and spend some more time doing "normal" things... or things that I don't usually give myself time to do!

Today started out a little rainy, so I decided that I would bake chocolate chip cookies with Lucy. Ron had to run to the store and pick up some ingredients that we were out of (he can throw a hat on and run to Family Fare more easily than I can make myself look presentable!). Eventually I got a good stopping point in my editing that I could get baking! I tied an apron around Lucy and she helped dump ingredients into the big bowl and stir them... later she helped drop the balls of dough onto the cookie sheet... she was really having a lot of fun. Of course she was more interested in eating the cookies...

Shocking sidenote: I quickly wiped off my hands and snapped a few pictures... then I had to get back to the task at hand: keeping her from eating all the chocolate chips out of the bowl, " 'cause they're yummy! " Apron, ponytail, how could I not take a few photos!

Kelly and Heath visited a couple times in the past month, and made a good point that we need to take more videos of Lucy (and Henry) to share online... so I decided this would be a perfect opportunity... Our daily life is full of zany moments like this (and the truth comes out, our house often looks like a tornado hit. This is what happens when I neglect cleaning for a few hours):

Ron's good friend from high school (in the U.P.) and his fiance are coming down for the weekend... we haven't seen Chad in 3 years - the last time was at their 10 year high school reunion, and I was 7 months pregnant with Lucy! I have never met Carrie, but I'm really looking forward to their visit and getting a chance to know her a little bit...

Reception

Last Saturday we celebrated Kelly and Heath's wedding with a hometown reception in our parents' back yard. Lots of friends and family members stopped by, we had great food, drinks, music, and stayed up talking and laughing after putting the kids to bed there...

Tiece made the cupcakes and everyone loved them! My parents did the rest of the food, other than the fabulous pasta salad brought by our good family friend Lori - she and her husband Dave were friends with our parents back when they were all first married...

As usual it was just nice to get another chance to hang out with Kelly and Heath - the kids know them well despite the fact they live in Evanston :). Everything went really smoothly, and with minimal stress getting things ready, the back yard looked great, and people were happy, and all to celebrate two people we love. Congrats (again) guys!

Daily Life

Last weekend Ron and I went up to Traverse City to tour the wineries - we ended up purchasing 1 bottle from 5 of the wineries, and 2 bottles from 2 of them. We have yet to drink any of that wine, as we are actually trying to build a collection of decent wine so we have it available to share with guests at all of our lavish dinner parties. Right! Anyway, it was nice to get away, even though we weren't gone for long. Then Saturday I had a session shortly after we got home.

I know it's kind of silly to blog about not blogging, but obviously there has been a significant drop in my number of posts this summer! The main reasons being 1) too much time wasted on Facebook has cut into my "excessive" blogging and 2) photography work is keeping me busy, and if I'm on the computer I should try to be doing something constructive (or else see reason #1). When I've spent time editing, uploading, e-mailing, and blogging a session, I really am about computered out.

On the homefront, our basement bathroom is decorated. What a difference matching shower curtain, towels, and a candle can make! I like it much more than our main floor bath! Uh-oh... another room I am going to want to redo in the next year or two! Lucy is supposed to be going to school this fall, but has regressed terribly in the potty-training department. Some days she is amazing and other days it is like she doesn't even care at all. We've tried charts, treats, tons of praise, asking her a lot, not asking her at all, reminding her to tell us... I know she'll get it eventually. Sometimes she announces that she has to go, and she stays dry for hours and hours (or all day!), other times she fights tooth and nail. If you know Lucy at all, you know she can put up quite a fight if she chooses to, and it can be tricky trying to convince her without her shutting down even more. I refuse to strap my child to a toilet all day until they happen to pee. Henry is working on even more teeth and I can tell by how he is crying that his mouth hurts. Poor guy. He's still pretty happy overall, and his teething isn't waking him up at night, which is nice....

... and I'm up too late again. Goodnight.

5 Years

Today is our 5th anniversary and we are heading up to Traverse City to tour the wineries on the Old Mission Peninsula. I think people never stop saying, I can't believe it's been __ years...." and I am no exception. It really has gone by so quickly! I love you Ron, and I love my life. Happy anniversary!

Blueberries

This morning Ron, Lucy, and I went blueberry picking at Irvine's in Hudsonville. We got there around 9 AM, the dew was still on the grass, and the sun was still fairly low in the sky. It was beautiful, and we were the only ones there! The owner and her dog greeted us and told us all about their farm. Last year we went to Reender's, which was great, but we loved Irvine's because it was closer, smaller, less commercial, and had heirloom varieties instead of the most common "Bluecrop" which tend to be larger but sometimes less flavorful. The kind we picked were Rubels, planted by the owner's grandparents.

Anyway, Lucy helped a lot picking at first, but then switched over to more eating. We ended up taking home 5 pounds, which is a perfect amount (we didn't use up the 7 pounds we picked last year). I spent most of the time picking, believe it or not. However, I did bring my camera and took some photos after my bucket was getting full.

We left Henry at home this time, and my mom came over and watched him for a couple hours. It's nice to give Lucy a little extra special attention these days, since I think she is starting to get more competitive with Henry as he accomplishes new things and is interacting with her a lot more.

We definitely have our new favorite place to go pick. I love taking advantage of this kind of stuff where we live.

More Pics Here

Tunnel Park Session

Last week we went to Tunnel Park with our friends Mike and Jenn and their boys. Jenn is a photographer, and we sort of exchanged "services." I got some great pics of her family and she got some of ours too, which is rare, being that I am usually on the other side of the camera! It was a lot of fun. I blogged about it on my MLP blog, and she just posted her pics on her own blog. Check them out HERE.