Christmas

A bit of bokeh fun with my new lens. :)

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas!  Many more photos to come!

Lens Envy

I rented a lens today.  It's my first time to do so, and I love the one I picked up!  It's a 24mm F1.4, the purpose of which I will reveal in a few days.  Photographing a walk with the kids is not the reason I rented the lens, but I took it along to get used to it and check it out.  I may never give it back. ;)

Little Miss Clarabelle

I am absolutely loving this picture of Janey.

 Zero gravity for this astronaut!

Love that kid!

 Seriously, it's hard to take a bad picture with such an awesome lens.

The Big Reveal: Noah's Geometric Boy Blanket

I finished Noah's blanket!

Actually, I finished it a couple of months ago, but I only just now took photos of it.

I wanted a more boyish pattern--the boyish colors help, of course, but something more geometric also seemed to be in order.

Although I do wish I had made it bigger, I am pretty pleased with how it came out.  The punch of red in the border, especially, makes me happy.

Two down, one to go!

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I adapted a pattern from this book, changing it so that it goes back and forth rather than round and round.  And then I just experimented with borders until I had something I liked--sorry, I didn't write it down!  But it was pretty simple, and you can probably figure it out by looking at it carefully, if you are so inclined.

Pattern:

-Foundation Row: Chain a multiple of 4 (such as 80), then ch 3 more.  Turn. 
-Row 1: In the fourth stitch from the hook, dc.  Dc two more times in the following chain stitches.  *Ch 1,  sk 1 ch, dc in each of the 3 following ch* all the way across.  Turn.
-Row 2: *Ch 3.  Sc in the sc sp between clusters* all the way across.
-Row 3: Ch 3.  2 dc.  *Ch 1, 3 dc in ch 3 sp* all the way across.  Turn.

Repeat rows 2 and 3 until the blanket is the length you'd like, changing colors as you go if you'd like stripes.  **Important: Row 2 is the contrast color row (the red in my blanket).  You will only see the stitches that you single chained between the clusters.  I only used the contrasting color every fourth row.**

Finish with any border you'd like.

The Many Faces of Noah T.

We took like a million photos over Thanksgiving in an effort to get a good family picture, and we did not come away with even one where everyone looked good.  And Noah had a lot to do with that.

Now, he's always been very expressive, but he went above and beyond that day.

 Dead eyes.

 Deader eyes.

Crazy eyes.

 Crazy everything.

 

 And that is my son.

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What do y'all think?  Nathan says we should send this out in a Christmas card, just to keep it real.  This is a slice of reality, for sure.

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But this one is pretty cute. :)

Thanksgiving 2013

I hope you all had a very happy Thanksgiving!  We certainly did.

We went to Austin to have Thanksgiving dinner with Nathan's family at his Uncle Steve and Aunt Jennifer's new house.  Their home and accompanying property is wonderful; in fact, I told Nathan, "I want this house."  Our dream is to buy five or ten acres and build a house on it one of these days, and this little visit helped confirm some ideas we have about what we'd like.

Besides the lovely setting, we really enjoyed being with family and felt thankful for some restful time to play pool, crochet, sleep, watch TV, enjoy the outdoors, and play.  Oh, and eat!

The first thing we did when we arrived was feed the chickens.  They are docile enough to eat out of your hand, which Noah enjoyed.

Eggs!  Different colors from different varieties of chicken.

Noah was fascinated by these "eggs," as he called them.  They were on the back of many leaves.  Anybody know what they are?  Perhaps some kind of insect produces them? 

Climbing up into an old tree house.

One thing I really liked about Uncle Steve and Aunt Jennifer's property was the rock wall that surrounds their yard. 

 It is made of rocks that were cleared from the yard, and, evidently, it was even photographed for Southern Living magazine.

 And if you're thinking, "There's no way the yard had enough rocks to build that," let me just give you a peek into the neighbor's property, which is typical of this area in the Texas Hill Country.

Nathan and his dad, tightening the zip line.  

The zip line starts about 20 feet off the ground but dips pretty low before the end.

Go Nathan!

I love Austin's face here.  Hold on tight!

Meanwhile, Clara was loving her pillow throne.

The food was delicious.  And I think we had about as many desserts as we did dinner items!

That's my bourbon pecan pie, which I make every year now.

Aunt Jennifer, Emily, and Aunt Traci.

It's nice to have some cheerful conversation while you wash up!

And, bless them, Uncle Steve and Aunt Jennifer had gotten out lots of their boys' old toys for my children.  All three kids loved the old Fisher Price goodies, as you can tell by the magnificent mess they made on the living room floor.

That night, we roasted hot dogs and marshmallows in their fire pit, and Noah and Jane went to bed nicely worn out and happy.

 The next morning, I stepped out of the sleeping house and took some photos of the foggy morning.

Sometime along my little jaunt, I realized that one of the pleasures photography can bring me is solitude.

And another is the space to simply observe and find the beauty in the mundane.  Like fog amidst the trees.

Later that day, we headed to Waco to stay at Nathan's parents' house for the rest of the weekend.  I must have been pretty relaxed, because I didn't even bother to get the camera out for the rest of the holiday!  Ha!  Mostly, what we did in Waco was watch football, crochet, eat, watch movies, clean up Jane's forts, eat, and hunt feral hogs (Nathan).  

Our family has had a particularly busy fall, and it was lovely that Nathan had the whole week off of work and we were able to really enjoy each other for several days.  Even though we still kept busy, it definitely felt like a holiday.  And now we are really looking forward to Christmas!

I hope you had as lovely a Thanksgiving as we did!

Minty

Early this fall, I took a couple of cuttings from my mint plant and rooted them.  It is just the perfect variety of mint for mint iced tea, and I didn't want to have to find just the right variety again next spring (yes, that's me at the store going from herb to herb, tasting tiny pieces of leaves) when I could just keep my own alive and replant it.

My little cutting has grown into this (yay!):

In October, while Nathan was out of town on business, I roped my dad into helping me with a major landscaping project.  Our front flower beds were horrendous, mostly because nothing would grow well because of poor soil (lots and lots and lots of clay).  So Dad and I rented a tiller and bought truckloads of compost and mulch (literally--"truckloads," plural).  And we spent all four hours of our tiller rental doing serious manual labor.  In the rain.  Truly, the last time I worked that hard was when I was actually in labor.  We--and the driveway--were covered in mud by the end of it all.  It was major.  In a nutshell, we tilled everything to loosen the soil, pulled out rocks and old roots, dug out a certain amount of "bad" soil, then tilled in some compost and fertilizer.  Now, that sounds simple, but it involved lots of hard work.  The next day, we went through and planted my new azaleas, seasonal flowers, and my Meyer lemon tree.  Then, later, I mulched the flower beds and my garden.

Because we started with a clean slate only a few weeks ago, and because of a generous layer of mulch, there haven't been many weeds.  But the other day, as I was walking by, I stooped down and pulled a little sprig of green that was poking through.  As soon as I pulled it, I thought, "Hmm.  That kind of looked like mint."  I sniffed my fingers.  Sure enough, it was.  Only it wasn't in the spot where the plant had been.  It was a few feet away.  I looked more closely, and I noticed a few more sprouts, spread all around.

Oh no.

Oh yes.  Basically, I did not pull up my mint thoroughly enough, so when we went through and tilled and redistributed the dirt, etc., basically what we did was to chop it into tiny little pieces and plant them all throughout my flower bed.

We are probably going to have a particularly minty summer, y'all.

My Noah

I'm loving this photo of Noah, because it captures who he is, in many ways.  He is engaging, inquisitive, and chatty, with "chatty" underscored.  This photo was taken just after Nathan had arrived home from his last trip, when Noah just could not stop talking and asking questions.  Cutie.