January 3, 2015

Happy New Year…….and Blogiversary!!!!

Stephanie Blog Information, Holiday 1 Comment

Happy New year everyone! Yesterday marked my 4 year blogiversary! Wow that is such a big milestone and I have to say I am blessed to have been a part of our lives for these past years! They have changed me for the better and I love being able to share my thoughts and ideas with all of you! I have been sadly too busy to hang out here with you and that makes me pretty sad. I spent alot of time this year making gifts for Christmas and then we had a flu that just wouldn’t end. However, it is a new year and everything is fresh and ready for new adventures! Ready for new blog posts, ready for new learning, ready for new business ventures, and ready for more family fun! I dont know about you, but I love this time of year. There is something so magical about new beginnings and about starting fresh. A whole year is just laying before us and ready. This year I have plans for this glorious stretch of time! Plans to learn with and teach my girls as we continue our homeschool journey. Plans to love my husband as we hit 10 years of married life together (GASP! That is a LONG time)! And plans to continue learning just about everything about making amazing photography! Maybe, just maybe, I will even get good enough to start my very own little business! Who knows! What I do know is that there will be love, there will be joy, and there will be faith. I wish the same for all of you too! Happy New Year Everyone!

November 10, 2014

Happy Halloween….A Million Days Late

Stephanie Family moments, Holiday, Homeschooling, Photography, thoughts 0 Comments

Life….am I right?! I took these photos on the Wednesday before Halloween and it has taken me that long to just to get them edited and a looking nice! Yikes! It took that long because the wind and the sun were just not allowing me to take pictures that were worth a crap. On top of that…….well life happens! Things have been busy and with some attitudes here that needed adjusting, and lots of fun stuff going on, it just hasn’t happened! But I know that you my fellow humans of our insane world, will understand and not think its totally nuts to post these a million days late! I took alot of pics of our homeschool group for Halloween and they were all just adorable all dressed up! But I will spare you the hundred pictures of everyone…….wait…….no I wont! 😉 You know me better then that right?! Well I will start with my own girls so you see then first before you get board……lol Bunny was Nancy Clancy (in case you are unaware of who that is, it is Fancy Nancy all grown up. Click here to see). Pup was Strawberry Shortcake! We made all the costumes and had fun doing it! I think that the wigs really make it all work! So……I proudly unveil…….Halloween pictures:

November 8, 2014

Hobbies Meet Real Life

Stephanie Homeschooling, Photography, thoughts 2 Comments

Have you ever had that realization that your hobby is just really hard to fit into real life? I love to be creative, to take pictures, to make cool stuff. But things like teaching kids, cooking food, and cleaning messes seem to take a lot of time! 😉 So much that sometimes it feels like I don’t have those stretches of time to devote to my random things. So I try do what every busy mom knows how to do really well…..multi-task! Photography is one of my fun things that is a little easier to work with! Its all about capturing a moment and telling a story with that! So I set up my tripod and my camera exposure. Then I took pictures of us working on our school work together. I was sitting on our couch reading and doing some lessons and, with my remote, I would take pictures! So I got to work on my fun stuff while teaching really usful subjects to my kids! The results were interesting and it is a good way to hold onto the daily realisty here! I don’t have pictures of us doing school work and since this is something that is a huge part of our lives it seems silly to not have some! The more I think about taking pictures, the more I realize that the pictures that speak the most to me, both that I take and that I see of others, are always the ones that are real. Where the family or the subject is engaged in something that is real and meaningful to them. Portraits are nice and look good on a wall, but the photos that invoke true feeling in someone are the unstaged ones. I guess that means my style of photography is leaning toward lifestyle photography. Here are my pictures from our lesson. I did some edits on them, just in case you are wondering!

What do you think? Do you have a hobby that you try to fit into the daily business of mommy life?

PS……I haven’t forgotten Halloween pics! I will post them next! 🙂

November 5, 2014

A Birthday Trip…..and Day of History!

Stephanie Family moments, Field Trips 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, my hubbie had his birthday! The girls and I took him off on a fun birthday adventure to The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Michigan! It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining and the weather was cool but not cold! We got to see SO many amazing things. From history to industry to transportation! There was a lot of cool pieces in this museum and if you ever have a chance to get there to check it out you should! I think one of the coolest thing was being able to see so many houses at the Village from famous people. We saw Webster’s House (you know…..he wrote the dictionary) and Robert Frost’s House, and Thomas Edison’s Workshop and the first places he installed electricity (this was a nice follow up to a trip we took to see Thomas Edison birthplace in the spring)! The girls, I think, thought that the Oscar Meyer Weiner Mobile was cool! My hubbie was really interested in seeing the original generators that Thomas Edison used! It was a great day for everyone…….at least until the end when our feet were killing us!

October 22, 2014

Its Just Us…..

Stephanie Photography 1 Comment

Things have been really busy here! In fact I have been so busy I almost have no time to really think and come up with fun posts to share. However, I have been taking pictures with the girls and I thought you many want to see a huge blob of photos that we have been taking! Most of these are on my Instagram account, but some are just fun that we have taken! The girls are LOVING my “new” inherited smart phone that allows us to take pictures whenever and wherever! I love memories…..don’t you?

October 18, 2014

Some First Edits

Stephanie Photography 2 Comments

Well as I promised, I have been working on some photo editing. I have a long way to go, but I had fun working on making these photos look more like I wanted them to. Here are the first batch from the park. I have included the before and after so you can see what I did. I don’t know if you care about all of that, but here it is anyway! 🙂 I for one am pretty proud of them……even if there is a lot left to be desired! I used Photoshop Elements 12 for editing and since I have a really crapping understanding of how to work with layer masks, most of my edits were done using adjustment layers, and some actions for the eyes. If you have some feedback on my technical skill, please share! If you don’t know technical stuff, feel free to comment anyway…..I love to hear from you! <3

October 15, 2014

Halloween-y Fun

Stephanie Holiday, projects 0 Comments

Well I had grand plans of writing a beautiful post yesterday evening, but a migraine kind of changed that plan pretty quickly! So I figure that I will let those thoughts percolate and instead share a fun little craft the girls did today! They have embraced the season of Halloween and I thought that finding a fun project would be good! So after browsing pintrest together, they found a sweet little witch made out of a tiny flower pot. Well, Bunny was so enthralled, she ran around the house checking to see if we happened to have all the materials…..and low and behold we did (those are the benefits of living with a craft obsessed momma). She collect everything and the girls got to work. I helped here and there, but they did all of it on their own. The only thing I had to help with was making the hats out of felt! It just amazes me how big my girls are getting. It seems like just yesterday we were finger painting and making leaf collages out of contact paper. Now they can paint, cut, and use the glue gun all by themselves! The results are awesome too! I guess I taught them well! 😉 I love that creativity is such a part of everything we do here. All this creativity seems to build their ability to think, and problem solve quicker then when they don’t spend as much time making things. I think it is such an important things…..plus its fun for all of us!

What about you? Does creativity make it on your list of daily fun?

October 12, 2014

Fantasic Fall

Stephanie Family moments 2 Comments

This week I had a crazy need to shoot…..in good lighting…..like a professional! So I drafted my girls, cancelled school for the day, and took them to the park at 9 in the morning! Not exactly the golden hour, but pretty close! At least I wasn’t shooting midday like I usually am. The colors in the trees are starting to turn and we found a little bridge in the park, by the lake…….it was just beautiful. So I made the girls play photo shoot with me (with the promise of the playground afterward). We had a lot of fun. We talked about fall and how leaves change color, collected some acorns, and buckeyes, and enjoyed the fall weather! The next day we headed to the beach for an impromptu dinner of pizza. Since the sun was just starting to go down, I brought my camera and snapped more pictures. We had fun, they had fun, and I got to play photographer. Who knows…..maybe I will do this for real someday! Want to see some of my pictures? Here they are. Straight out of camera (because I really don’t know how to photo edit yet.). Don’t worry…..I plan to play around and do some before and after with them later on! I just had to share! 🙂

Tell me what you think! I would love some feedback! 🙂

October 12, 2014

Celebrating the Bucket List

Stephanie Family moments 0 Comments

So I am sure that many of you have been introduced to the amazing story of the Bucket List Baby…..Shane and his family. It is a quite a story that has gone viral a while ago. This amazing, loving couple found out that their baby had a birth defect and he would surely not live for more then a few hours. And they decided that, instead of terminating the pregnancy, they would love and live life with their baby as long as they could! So they went to the zoo, to baseball games, and many different things that they would have done when he was born. Shane was born Thursday and passed away a few hours later. In the words of his parents: “Shane spent his entire life in the arms of people that loved him unconditionally and I don’t think you could ask for a more beautiful life than that,”

This story touched my heart with the love, the deep love, of family. Love is something that spans the pain of death and the joy of life. It never ends. And this family was offered a huge, painful experience on a plate. They could have mourned and lived their time with overwhelming sadness…..and honestly they had every reason to. But instead they took hold of the joy of life and lived it to the fullest with their baby! His short life brought joy to his family and also to the world. Together they showed us all that love transcends sickness, pain, and even death. They celebrated life and their son!

What an awesome lesson for us. Celebrate life! Honestly we have no idea how long we have to live in this world together, so we should celebrate. Not just birthdays or holiday or large life event, but everyday moments! Celebrate the fact that we have love in our life, that we have our family, that we have been given our very own moments that are just ours. Some are bad, or unhappy, and some are amazing, simple or just plain ordinary. Yet they all can be celebrated. Light candles for dinner, take a trip to that local beach that you keep saying you will go to, hit the zoo, see a game at the big stadium, heck, just make a cake…..for the heck of it! Do something to celebrate! (Ps. this is a pictures of us having pizza on the beach the other day…..celebration of the sun that finally came out after three days of gray!)

What do you think? Do you ever celebrate life just because?

October 7, 2014

An Apple A Day

Stephanie Fall, Family moments 1 Comment

Today ended badly……really badly. It was one of those days that went down in a flaming glory of tears and yelling. After much crying (by them) and much yelling (by all of us), we hugged and decided that tomorrow would be better and that we were all sorry! So instead of telling you all about that…..I will share all the fun we had yesterday. (It was a better day).

Yesterday, our friend invited us to go to the local apple orchard for s festival they have there! It was wonderful! The weather was cool, but not freezing and it wasn’t raining! There was fair food, rides, ponies, and apple picking! But the coolest thing there (in my opinion) were the camels you could ride! Yes….read it again…..camel rides! AWESOME! All in all it was just a fun family day…..and those are the best kind right? Plus we did pick a very large half bushel of apples too…..there will be lots of yummy thing made from those! Here are some pictures of out fun (a very real happily ever after moment)