Family Reading Night

Family Reading Night was last week at Kali's school. They searved pizza, salad, cookies, and lemonade and had lots of games available for the kids. The favorite was the book walk (naturally I have no pictures of that). The same concept as a cake walk but in the center of the room is a giant pile of books and when your number or letter is called you may choose a book. Corey was satisfied with his first book - a book about Planet Earth (he's my science kid) but Kali played for about a half hour and came home with an armful of new books. The kids also enjoyed the fishing pond and bowling. At the end of the night there was a poetry presentation by a visiting librarian. She was great and really got the kids excited about poetry...you can see Corey there in the front row. I was practicing more with not using my flash so the pictures are a bit soft...but I was really happy to be able to take pictures during the reading without being disruptive with my flash and have them come out as clear as they did.

Practice.

I recently purchased a new lens for my camera. There is a bit more of a learning curve than I was anticipating but I've been working with it in my limited free time...all of these above were taken in automatic without flash. I'm not a fan of flash and am hoping to learn more about setting the ISO, aperature, and shutter speed to further reduce the blur/fuzzy edges. I'm really looking forward to an upcoming vacation and of course summer - to practice even more in better natural light. Ours is really "white" because of all the snow!

*edited: after looking over the photos again I do believe the flash was on for the second to last photo...her shirt is just a bit too bright.

Kali lost a tooth!

Kali was SO thrilled when she discovered that she had a loose tooth! Her friends have been loosing them for awhile now and she's been anxious to "be included." She worked and worked and soon it was loose enough that with a little tug from dad it came right out! And the first visit from the tooth fairy went without a hitch which suprised me a bit since we have a bit of an issue with strangers coming into our home at night, i.e. the Easter Bunny and Santa. Of course Kali and Corey think the tooth fairy is tiny, about the size of a bug, so maybe that makes her less threatening!

Sledding

We love the groomed sledding hill by the grade school!

Playing at the Ice Caves

We snowshoed out to the ice caves a few Saturdays ago and had a great time playing on the ice! The surface we're laying on is so smooth the kids would lay down and we'd push them around - Kyle really enjoyed this. The kids were all a bit cold by the time we got back to the car but what an Adventure!

Happy New Year!

We had a low-key New Year's Eve like usual. Hanging out with family and watching the local fireworks followed by sparklers for the kids. It was very cold so we didn't stay out long. After the kids went to bed Dave and I put in a movie and counted our change - this may sound funny but we inherited a giant glass water jug from a friend and we use it to collect loose change. Once a year we like to count it to see how we did for the year we figured this night was as good as any! We're up $100 from last year - not too bad!

Christmas Day!

We start with gifts and breakfast at our house Christmas morning and then go to Grandma and Grandpa's house for more gifts and a relaxing afternoon playing with new toys and being with family. I never did get a picture of Kyle with his things because he was in bed by the time I took the others - but he really had a lot of fun this year!