Thursday, October 14, 2010

Back to School

Krystal is presenting her history report about the mummification process. Her project includes a "stone" sarcophagus, a "wooden" coffin, a "gold" coffin, the Barbie mummy she made, canopic jars with organs made from clay, and plenty of furniture, food, and jewels to last for Barbie in the afterlife.
Jared's presentation was about the Great Pyramid at Giza built during the reign of the Egyptian king Khufu also known as Cheops. Jared was interested in the architecture of the tunnels and chambers of the inside of the pyramid. He did a great job researching online and presenting what he learned.
Clarissa talked about the games and toys of the Ancient Egyptians. Chris helped her make the wooden horse with wooden wheels. She told everyone that two of the games the Egyptians used to play were leap frog and tug-of-war, which was followed by a tug-of-war game outside, boys against girls of course. Much to everyone's surprise, (and heavily debated afterward) the girls won. There were about 9 girls and 7 boys, but the boys were older and bigger. Those girls are tough.
To make learning how to count change fun, we played candy store and Clarissa was the store clerk.
Krystal's mummy during mummification process. These are the jewels and amulets that were put inside her wrappings.
After using math to make some homemade playdough, the girls learned or practiced new words by forming the words out of playdough and making a figure of what the word represented.
Amber started Preschool this year. She absolutely loves it. Preschool is taught by the mothers in the group, each of us trading off weeks. There are four other kids from church in her Preschool. So far they've learned All About Me and about Fall. Amber is learning to write her name and loves doing her schoolwork (workbooks that she picks out).

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Happy for 13 years


Chris and I have been married for 13 years now. On the day that he asked me to marry him, I made him promise that he would make me laugh every day of our lives. He has definitely kept that promise.
The other morning I walked into the kitchen to find this tomato amongst the others on our windowsill. It's the little things like this that keep us happy.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Close Encounters

I have been learning how to use the macro setting on my camera. As a result I've captured some neat things. Some are good pictures, others not as good.
This is one of my irises just after a light rain.
These are three baby birds that we fed for one evening and morning for my friend so she could go out with her husband. The birds eat every hour (but not at night thank goodness). We don't know what kind of birds they are, but their mouths are HUGE when open waiting for food (that's what that orange flower-looking thing is). I never did get a good pic of them, they kept moving and hiding under the flap of the box and the camera focused on the grass in the foreground.
Freshly washed tomatoes. This shot was difficult because I had to hold the tomatoes in one hand to get the right light while trying to hold the camera and zoom in with the other hand.
This is a nest of bumblebees that we came across in our compost. I didn't actually use the macro on this, but zoomed in a lot! I didn't want to get too close. I have never seen a bumblebee nest and thought their large marble sized eggs were rather interesting.
I found this eastern box turtle one morning while walking. I brought him home and eventually gave him to a friend to use for a boy scout merit badge. The kids enjoyed watching him try to get out of the box.

And finally, my favorite subject to shoot...our kids. This is Amber sucking her thumb while napping. I love that I could capture every detail from her eyelashes down to the freckle on her thumb. Hmmm, what camera feature should I play with next?

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Our Dancing Princesses

I got the inspiration from a book I found at the library to photograph the girls as they were dancing. We had a lot of fun and got some good poses too.

Clarissa and Krystal are so happy when they're dancing. They've been taking dance class from Miss Hannah for this whole school year and have loved every minute of it. I was out of town during their recital and Chris forgot to bring the camera, but he took pictures of their costumes once he got home.
They did a dance from The Nutcracker Ballet. Clarissa is the sugar-plum fairy queen and Krystal is a flower.
Both girls did a wonderful job and I got to see their performance when I got home because Chris did remember to bring the video camera.
Clarissa even had a solo and she did great.

Amber wanted to get in on the action too. She loves to dress in tutus and pretend that she is going to dance class. She already knows some of the positions as well.

Monday, May 24, 2010

A Photo Tour of Downtown Radford

A couple weeks ago some friends and I got together with our cameras and walked around downtown Radford to take pictures of anything that we found to be interesting. I learned a lot, but I also had a lot of fun. My family doesn't understand why I took so many pictures of strange things, but this is a sampling of the pictures I think are interesting.



















Monday, May 17, 2010

Continuous Fun

One spring day with nothing better to do, the kids and I decided to play with the continuous shooting mode on the camera. We quickly discovered that jumping pictures were really funny. The first four pictures are of Clarissa and Krystal jumping in succession. The others are just some funny shots taken while in the midst of jumping.



This pictures of the four kids is the one that Chris chose for his desktop on his computer at work. We're kinda crazy like that.