date stamped

Alrighty friends, so I thought I had a moment of genius: to document my week in pictures and put a cool (yet functional) date stamp on each photo. I liked it for the first few pictures, but after awhile I think it became distracting. With both a watermark and a date stamp on each photo, I think it's a little much. And...since I'm blogging less these days, this is a week's worth of photos which might be a bit of an overload. Maybe grab a snack before you dive in? ;-)

I've continued to be a little frustrated with my style of photography lately. My pictures always look simple, clean and clear, but there's a style that has been inspiring me even more these days. I've been reading Molly Flanagan's blog the past couple months (another recommendation from Ashley), and I love love love her style! Pop over to Molly's blog and you'll see what I mean, and how her photos look different from mine. They're so real life...messy backgrounds (which I love), super wide apertures (when I do that, it looks like I messed up)...I don't know. They have a really cool quality that I haven't been able to achieve.

Even though I didn't get the look I was going for, I still like these pictures, and it IS what we actually did during the past week, so here we go.

A morning with my sweet girl at the park.






A hug for biggest brother.


A little walk through the woods.






The picture below is one of my new favorites. ;-)


Running errands after school...




I'm including a shot of the kids' back-to-school shoes so I can share a little TT tale. It was threatening to rain, so I lined up these shoes on our deck to snap a quick picture. I thought TT was following me outside, but instead I turn around to find her sweetly waving goodbye, a HUGE smile on her face, closing the sliding glass door and locking me out of the house. We have 2 decks off of our kitchen: one with stairs leading down to our yard, and one totally enclosed, a good 8 feet above the ground. (Guess which deck I was trapped on?)


After being trapped outside on the deck for quite some time, (quietly pounding on the sliding glass door to get my boys' attention above the roar of the Wii, but so as not to attract attention from my neighbors - embarassing!) with dinner rolls burning in the oven, and TT coming back to check on me and wave every so often...I headed off to the flower garden to pray for my sanity to return.


Seriously went back to the same telephone wires to re-do my bird shot. :-)
(5 1/2 hours apart, and they look kind of the same).


Go Avalanche! Drew's first game of the season and they won!


No one scored while Drew was goalie. ;-)


Fast forward to this morning. Much of our Monday involved me comforting TT who was missing her brothers. She kept crying "I need my bubbies! Bubbies??? Come back!" Then she proceeded to inform me that she needed to go to school too because she is seven. ;-)


Guess who just moved out of her crib and into a big girl bed!


OK, wait! Now here's more of the look I was going for. Kind of hazy, messy...pretty much the opposite of my regular style. :-) What do you think?


Did anyone make it to the end?? - WHEW! I actually started these pictures last Wednesday, but I think I'm going to stop here on Monday. Too many! If you made it all the way through - yay! And thanks for looking! :-)