For Grandma

My Pretty Ballerina

Today was my big girls dance recital. This day has been 11 months in the making. Eleven months, and it all leads up to 2 minutes on stage. There was a lot of prep work for this day. I had to sew the straps of her costume and make sure everything fit correctly, then I had to do her hair and my mom did her makeup. It was tough getting all the required make up on her. It's WAY more make up than any 4 year old should ever have to wear, but honestly, on stage it doesn't seem like she's wearing much at all. Gigi was pretty thrilled at the lipstick she was able to wear at least.

So, here is my baby all dressed up, ready to go dance her little heart out!

Four Year Pics

Just being Cute

My mom wanted to put curlers in Gigi's hair the other night, although Gigi's hair is naturally curly...

Anyway, the little ham decided to start posing, so of course my mom grabbed the camera!

And, NO, she was not coached to pose like this! This is just her!

J's Six Month Pictures

So my little man is six months old now. :(

It was time to update his pictures. My mom just got a new camera, so I decided to borrow it and have some fun.

I am very pleased with the way these pics came out! So much so that I have decided to skip the normal JcPenney shoot.

Yes, yes...I am quite proud of myself! :)

These are just a few of the over 100 shots I did... (yeah I went a little crazy!)

Enjoy!

Happy Easter!

Happy Valentine's Day

We ended up not getting to most of the crafts I wanted to do for Valentine's day. Okay, actually we only did ONE craft. Oh well.

Gigi made foam door knob hangers. She gave one to Mima and put the other on our front door.

My mom kept Gigi over night at her house, so we only had little J to take care of. Hubby made a yummy steak dinner for the two of us (and even cleaned the kitchen when he was done!) and we watched a movie. Nothing too exciting or overly romantic, but we did have some quiet time while J slept so that was nice. When the movie was over we just hung out and talked a while.

Oh, something romantic hubby did do - he actually MAILED a Valentine's Day card to me! I though it was so sweet. It was a very nice surprise for me when I checked the mailbox. He definitely earned some brownie points with that unexpected move!

Finally, here are the picures we had taken of the kids. We sent them out to family - hopefully everyone got them by Valentine's - if not, sorry!

Three Months

My little man is officially three months old and as promised, I took him to JcPenny to get some pictures PROFESSIONALLY done - Since I obviously have not mastered taking professional quality pictures at home yet.

So, here they are.

He give big smiles to the photographer. She kept saying how easy it was to photograph him. He did a great job.

Even when he turned all "serious" he was cute!

My Little Fairy

I just had to share these photos.

We had these taken a couple of days ago. A woman had set up a little kiosk in the mall and was taking pictures of little girls as fairies and little boys as knights. I just had to take Gigi. She picked out the dress - the blue one of course! I am really happy about the way they came out!

Christmas card pictures - take two

Well, we attempted to take some better Christmas pictures tonight. I really liked the overall look of these pics better because of the red background. Last time we just had our wall behind us.

In all we took 107 pictures. Of those, there were only four that were halfway decent. Unfortunately, they were all very blurry - again.

At this point I just have to suck it up and deal with it because we are out of time. If I don't mail out the cards tomorrow morning, no one will get their cards by Christmas.

I'm really disappointed and wishing now that we would have just made the appointment at Jcpenny to have them done - even though J would've only been two weeks old. I'm very unhappy with our family pics this year.

Although I think that our camera (which is a Kodak that we got for $80) is partially to blame, I must admit I think most of the problem is user error.

Why is it that I was able to get a nice clear shot of a butterfly earlier today? And why is that this picture (NOTE: a picture that I am not in) came out so nice and clear?

Coincidence??

It will be a few years before it's possible, but I think for our next camera I am going with my mom's idea and forking out the extra dough for a digital SLR. These are our memories after all.

Interesting sightings

I took the kids to my mom's house this afternoon after a quick trip to the library for some more books.

As we were getting out of the car I sighted two interesting things I just HAD to snap a picture of. Thankfully, I have finally learned to ALWAYS travel with the camera, even on short trips, because you just never know when a great photo op will arise.

So, I grabbed the camera and caught these images;

A beautiful butterfly that seemed to love the Bougainvillea bush in front of my mom's house.

And a blimp flying overhead.

Christmas Card Pictures

Every year when we send out our Christmas cards we always include a family portrait. We usually get them professionally taken, but again this year it just hasn't happened. Where we go, we would have had to have then done by mid November since it takes at least 2 weeks to print and come back to the studio. It's a pain that it takes so long, but I get them done for only $4 a sheet.

So, once again we attempted to take the pics yourself. We set up the tripod in front of our tree and tried our best. Most of the pictures were out of focus and once again, the lighting was horrible. I am really starting to hate my camera.

We did manage to get a few really cute shots of the kids. There were other nice pics, but they were ruined either because they were out of focus or the lighting was really bad.

This is one that I like of all of us, but it is blurry. I may not look it, but it's quite blurry when it's printed. If it were clear it probably would have won as our card picture for this year. Hubby thinks it is good enough, but I told him we need to get dressed up again and do them over. his response? "Yes, dear." Good man!

There was a cute one of hubby and I with Gigi.

A couple of good pics of the kids together.

And my absolute most favorite picture was this one of J on his own.

I'm hopeful that we can get some better shots when we try again later this week. We'll have to set up some lamps for more lighting or something. We'll see how it goes.

One month

Ok, so I know my posts are a bit out of order and a little behind, but I am just not as disciplined when it comes to blogging as most.

December 5, J turned one month. With Gigi, we had professional pics done at one month, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and one year as well as Christmas photos. Unfortunately for J, we have not scheduled any professional pics for him yet. I will probably get his 3 month pics done but because of the time of year, the photo studios are so booked right now.

Either way, I did not want to miss out on getting some cute pics of him at one month. I decided to try to take some pics on my own. I need to find a better way of doing this though. The lighting was horrible and I wanted to get them done before I forgot and too much times passed that I didn't think about waiting till J was in a good picture taking mood. Still I was able to get some half-way decent pics. I need to try to fix the lighting in most with an editing program, but I just don't have the time to mess with it now.

After the touch ups they should be ok to add to his scrapbook. I was only able to get about 10 minutes of cooperation from him before he had a meltdown.

I'm not going to give up on trying to take nice pics at home. I just need to plan better next time.