Happy Anniversary

Our First anniversary I thought it would be cool to dress up in my wedding dress and take a picture. I imagined doing that every year. The next few years saw us on vacations for our anniversary and I didn't pack my wedding dress, but I have had a few photo shoots with my dress unrelated to our anniversary and I could almost play it off like there is one for each year... so here are the wedding dress pictures and after that are the real anniversary pictures.

Five years of "oh, sorry did I hit your tooth AGAIN!?"



Five years and five homes



Five years of our own little family (now complete with kiddo)



Five years of giggles everyday



Five years of distracted...

what's going on

My baby is looking cute as ever...

we celebrated Jules and Manuel's wedding

the cousins got together.

and I have been turning this

into this. and planting seeds... I hope they sprout...

My first Mother's Day as a mother...

I got flowers from my mom, a card from Scott's mom and a text from Jen.

Girls Night!!

This weekend was a stake Father-Son Camp-out.
Scott and his Dad and Brother and nephews and brother-in-law-in-law went.
So we gals got together at James and Alicia's home and had a sleepover. I didn't take any pictures, but we had fun, fun, fun getting the place put together.
We unpacked the rest of Alicia's stuff, set up the office, play room, family room, boy's room, craft room, storage room, and cleaned up the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom.

Jaedyn had a hard time going to sleep with all the activity going on and I was afraid I would not hear her in the middle of the night, so she slept in bed with me.
Ugh.
We don't co-sleep for a reason. It was really nice to be able to check on her at any given moment. The problem was that I DID check on her at every given moment. I didn't get much sleep myself and I was afraid to turn over in my sleep and smush her so I was a little stiff when I woke up.

However it was so much fun to hang out with the Farrar girls and Leah, the 3 year birthday girl. I'd love to do something like that at my home... I just need places for all the stuff!

There is too much on my mind to write about

I mean I have all sorts of topics that I think the internet would like to know about, from what toothpaste I use to My feelings on Mother's Day to my siblings and their adventures... but I have a family now and I don't need to be spending so much time at the computer (Which is actually funny because I was at the computer looking at other people's blogs last night until my eyes hurt and when I went to bed all I saw were the marching ants found on TV...).

Word Verification

In protest to the word verifications found at the end of post comments; I am starting something new. I will from this point forward post the word verification in the body of my commment. HA! Take THAT comment verification!!

My first contest entry...

For a TWILIGHT special edition DVD.
I hope I win...
Bacca is hosting it HERE at her Blog.

Tres de Mayo

Thank you Farrar's for having us over for Tres de Mayo.

The food not only looked delicious, it was terrific!

The Tulip Fields

We went to the Tulip Fields.


One of these flowers is not like the others...

Because it was the VERY end of the season, Scott and Aidan's favorite color was pretty much the only one on display.

It was beautiful.

some of the Tulips were HUGE.

and colorful.

And some had many many layers. This one looks like a carnation, but it was the size of a soup mug.

And some tiny tiny ones

White tulips of medium size surrounded by old yellow daffodils and smallish yellow tulips.

These are my very favorite. Black Tulips. I want to get some to plant with a white Daffodil.

What "great" is.

Hi Peach,

The Secret to doing anything great is to first determine what "Great" is. Then you determine how the doing will get you there. Are there things you loved about other's photos that you thought where "great"? For me it's a feeling captured, and sometimes the artsiness or creativity in the angle which forces a viewer to think from a different perspective. So only photos which do that for ME are great to me. Art is tough like that. What is great to you? Do you like the brighter colors or the sharper contrast? then you can become a great photo editor. maybe not witty or intelligent, maybe a bit ethereal, but hopefully enough commonsensical that it helps.

-James P. Pirate

What is great... I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I can tell you WHO is great, but I'm not sure I know WHY. Pardon the rambling as I try to figure it out.
Let's see I like when photos are not blurry... no when the subject of the photo is not blurry. When there are several layers to the picture. When it tells a story. sometimes.
I like unique lighting and seeing sunbeams. I like bold colors. I like sets of pictures when you can't tell what the subject is in the first picture but it comes into focus or into perspective by the end of the set.
Great photographers can choose what comes out blurry and what is in focus. They can umm... I'll have to think about it more.

They KNOW what they are doing when they take a picture, how to get the desired result without closing their eyes and hoping for a good picture to turn out.

I can do PHOTOS!!

The story goes that I took pictures and stuff at the wedding and I thought they were pretty decent. But then I saw some of the other pictures that were taken. Much to my shame I realized that the pictures I took and showed off were not very good. Since I like to take pictures I wanted to do better. I was thinking I'd have to go take a class so I could take a good picture. But that requires money and time... and I have little to none of either.

Sigh.

But then I was playing around with my online picture program, Picasa. I can do all sorts of cool things. See the before and after pictures. Now I can be proud of some of the pictures I took. (I have also realized that I like nature and still life shots MUCH better.) They are arranged un-edited above the edited versions.

Quiet as a hummingbirds chirp...

Or in other words not quiet at ALL!!

Hmmm I don't have much for that, but I thought it made a nice blog post title. :)

On Saturday we had a full day. In the morning Alicia and Jaedyn and I went to a Woman's Conference. It was really great. Then we went to the park.




We played and after James' group left we walked to the Snowpetal Garden. There were two other families taking spring pictures with babies. One was 9 months old and she was playing with the petals. the other was like two weeks old and getting his glamour shots with mom. We kept hearing this wierd noise and it took the boys a while with their sharp trees to find this:
which turns out to be this little guy:

A little ruby-throated hummingbird.

Then we dropped Jaedyn with some sitters (thanks James and Alicia) and went to Supercross. That was awesome.
With Bean, Pam and some of their friends.