beautiful family "S"

I had the privilege of photographing this family yesterday. You may recognize them from my sunflowers post earlier this fall. This time I was able to photograph the extended family. The were a treat to work with. (Sorry for the mass quantity of photos, there were too many to choose from!)

This is Mom & Dad

I told "J" he should model, he is that photogenic!

Thank you families "S", "L" and "B". I had a wonderful time with you.

santa was very good to me...

It's so pretty...here are my first "real" photos I have been able to take. I was very pleased, especially since they were taken 15 minutes before sunset.

I also got one of these...maybe Santa is tired of my aching back, neck and shoulders from all of my jewelry making!

A Griswold Thanksgiving

There are many times I feel our life is straight out of a Griswold family vacation movie. This Thanksgiving definitely could be titled as such.

The morning began crisp and bright. Kristian (age 9) and I decided to run the local Thanksgiving Day 5K. This was our second time to run this race, the last time he was when he was 7. Anyhoo, I knew we would have timing chips. It was the first time I have worn a timing chip in a race so I wasn't sure what to expect. We were signing up at the race so they just handed us the chips. The little picture on the instructions showed them attached to the shoe so we tied them into our laces. Later in the morning I noticed a lot of people had twist tie things to hook them to the laces so I asked a race volunteer if it mattered that ours were in the laces. He said no, but after the race they will cut them off, don't let them or they will cut your laces.

Kristian and I had a great race! I always let him set the pace and we knew we wanted to try to beat our last time of 34:28. As we crested toward the finish line I could see 29:00 flashing on the time clock so we hustled to the finish to cross at exactly 30:00. We were thrilled! Well as we crossed the finish line these two people came at us with these things that looked like metal detectors. All I could think of was DON'T CUT OUR LACES! So I was trying to get away from them. WHOOOPS! They were scanning our time chips. DOH! So our posted times were a few seconds off... :)

Later in the day we sat down to our wonderful Thanksgiving feast. Since Kristian was diagnosed with Gluten Intolerance I have not enjoyed cooking as much as I used to. This holiday I decided to get off my duff and make everything from scratch. It was all so delicious! We even had gluten free stuffing, pumpkin pie cheesecake and chocolate chip pecan pie.

As Clark, I mean Kent, ahem...started to carve the turkey he said "where is all the meat? This is all bone!" Oh wait a minute, he cooked the turkey upside down!! All that careful rubbing of spices and basting, and the turkey was upside down! Turns out it doesn't matter if your turkey is upside down, it just marinated more down there and it was scrumptious. :)