Christmas in March?

Back in December, my children really wanted to make a gingerbread house. However, my Christmas season realllly did not go the way I wanted it to this year, and so we never got around to it. Fast forward to yesterday….a fellow freecycler offered a gingerbread kit(she bought only to find out her children didn’t want to make a gingerbread house!), and I was the lucky recipient. We picked it up yesterday, and I told the kids that we could decorate it today once they got their schoolwork done. I think I should do this every day, because my goodness, they were done fast!

Zoe was especially excited, because she’s the youngest and she hasn’t gotten to do that much decorating yet.

All four of them helped, though.

I’m really not sure Zoe got much icing onto the house, but she had fun.

Joshua did actually manage to apply some icing.

I think Sonia might be a model later in life…she does this kind of thing all on her own when I get my camera out.

A sneak preview for Sammi and Steve

Sammi and Steve are getting married this spring in Colorado, and the invitations they purchased for their wedding require a photo on the front of each of them. So, we got together yesterday to take a picture for that purpose…I took 350 pictures, though, so they have just a few more than they need for the invites.

I have a ton more to edit, but I wanted to get at least a couple up for them today.

Miss Difficult-to-Photograph’s Birthday

I do sometimes take pictures of things other than birthdays…but there just have been a lot of those in our family over the last six weeks!

My niece has been on my blog several times before…you can see her here and here. She’s a very energetic kid, so it requires lots of patience to get remotely decent pictures of her!

She did stand still to decorate her cupcakes.

And she sat still while her mom lit her candles.

Deep breath…

I think her hair nearly caught on fire.

But, she was very pleased with herself!

And she was pretty tickled about the cupcakes(well, at least the frosting!).

Sonia’s Birthday

Naturally, there’s a licking-the-frosting picture.

She requested a Peep bunny cake(she has a large blue stuffed Peep). I did my best.

It was chocolate on the inside.

The loot.

A birthday card.

The first present was a book, which my mom read to her.

Of course, after presents we had cake.

Zoe helped with the blowing-them-out part.

Fun with Bubbles

Tiger Lily

Ooh, look at me! I sharpened a picture! In Photoshop, no less.

I’m not a very practiced Photoshopper, so I get sort of tickled when I actually manage to do something decent using it!

Here’s the picture before:

And here it is with some sharpening and a bit of vignette:

It’s still a bit grainy(I didn’t realize until later I had my ISO set really high), but I like it a lot better with the sharpening.

A first for me…

I don’t usually have an opportunity to take pictures of adults, let alone couples, but my sister-in-law asked me to take a picture of her with her boyfriend. So I did, right there in her kitchen(which has awesome light, due to the wall of windows!).

I think they’re so cute together.