Continual State of Becoming

Weeks 50-52:  The End Wow, I can't believe it's been a whole year since this started! This was the picture for our Christmas card this year.  I really like it, despite the weird shadows on faces.  Again, I'm just not great at that whole family portrait style.  But that's ok. A very rare moment where the boys are still and getting along.  A little movie night before bedtime. Aaron's most recent growing up picture!

Oh Aaron!  He is quite the little boy.  Very strong willed, very independent, very energetic.  It makes for a lot of fun and a lot of frustration.  He's also kind of the reason I got into photography again.  I got my DSLR a few months after he was born so I could take some "good" photos of my own kids.  What I quickly learned was that taking good photos of your own kids is extremely difficult.  Especially when you have a child who has no interest in cooperating.  Up until recently it was nearly impossible to get Aaron to cooperate the way I thought he should  for my pictures.  Rather than living in frustration (on both our parts), I quickly learned to just go ahead and let him do his thing.  The result....  tons and tons and tons of photos of the back of his head.  Because he has always been more interested in going off and exploring and doing his own thing rather than hanging out with me and my camera.  But I've embraced the "back of the head" shots and eve

Week 49:  Raking Leaves Our move is cancelled.  There are many, many reasons.  And at the end of the whole process (which sucked by the way), we feel like we have made the best decision for our family as a whole.  So we're staying put, and we're happy about it.  While all of the deliberation was going on our two trees in the front yard decided to drop all of their leaves.  After things calmed down we finally got around to raking the leaves up.  By "we" I mean Matt.  The kids jumped in the piles and threw the leaves at each other and I took pictures and tried using the video feature on my DSLR (which came out alright, just really shaky).  Matt did the hard labor.  Next to tackle... the backyard leaves, which is a much bigger undertaking.  I think we're going to get a leaf blower first though.  Also, I want to keep working on the video stuff with my camera so that we can use it with the new baby :)

Week 48:  Happy Halloween! .... with spider webs!  (As we say in our house for some reason).  This year Aaron went as Captain America and Dylan was a Ghostbuster.  They both loooooved their costumes.  Aaron finally understands what trick-or-treating is and he actually went out twice as long as Dylan.  Candy is a strong motivator for him.  All in all it was a great Halloween.

Week 47:  Pumpkinville Actually, I think they renamed it Pumpkin Village, but we still call it Pumpkinville in our house.  This is at an Animal Park down the street from us.  We usually go every year, but now that Dylan's in school during the week it's a little harder to make it (it gets super crowded over the weekends).  So.... we pulled him out of school after lunch and made a surprise afternoon visit.  Everyone had a great time.  Aaron wants to go back on a near constant basis.

Week 46:  Preschool Field Trip to the Farm! While in the midst of getting the house ready for the market I took a morning off in order to accompany Aaron on his field trip to the farm (it was either I go with him, or he doesn't go).  It was a beautiful morning, we had a lot of fun, and I had a good opportunity to use my camera.  We ate apples, picked a couple pumpkins, fed the animals, and then played on lots of fun playgrounds.  (this overload of photos can make up for my lack of pictures from last week.)