The lyrics to Tim McGraw’s My Next Thirty Years have been playing through my head quite a bit over the days leading up to my 30th birthday today.  I remember when I was a teenager, thinking 30 seemed SO OLD  Of course now, it feels SO much different!  I thought I would take a few minutes to reflect on some things over the past and look ahead to the future.  I feel like I’m starting a whole new chapter in my life and from what I hear, the 30’s are fabulous!

It’s always funny to think back say, 10 years ago, what I thought things would be like for me when I was 30.  I thought…

• I would have 2 wonderful kids
• I would have an office job/career
• I would have a great husband and family
• I would be in excellent shape
• I would have more self confidence
• I would feel older

Now, don’t think that many of those aren’t true!  Fortunately, the most important ones are true on there!  I have 2 of the best kids a mommy could ask for and an even better husband!  But I never even dreamed…

• I would become a photographer
• I would own my own business and actually be relatively successful so far with it
• I would want to be a stay at home Mom
• I would have such a hard time looking the way I want to
• I would still need to work on my self confidence as much as I’d like

But that’s the fun thing about life, you take the good with the not so good and you just have to embrace it.  While there’s a whole slew of things I would love to change about MYSELF, there is very little that I would want to change at all in my life.  I am SO incredibly blessed to have gone down this path.  There was a time in my life where it could’ve turned out VERY differently, and I thank God every day that it didn’t as I would be in a very different place right now.

I get caught up in the day to day grind and often lose sight of how lucky and blessed I am.  And I need to try to take a step back every so often and remember that I have a LOT to be thankful and grateful for.

With all that said, I can’t wait for what the next 30 years holds!  It’s crazy to think that Tyson will be 35 then and Bailey will be about my age, hopefully I’ll be a Grandparent by then and enjoying the fruits of our hard work and labor.

Until then though, I’m going to try and savor each day and embrace my “30’s” and try to really become the person I know I want to be.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far!  Quite the rambler today!  :-P

I *think* we’re ready.  At least I hope we are!  All that’s left for me to do is order the groceries (I’m doing this online and then going to pick them up on Wednesday I think).  All of the presents have been purchased and wrapped and I cannot wait to GIVE all of our gifts this year.  It’s definitely more fun than receiving!

Last Friday Tyson had his little Christmas program at preschool.  While the program consisted mostly of a local choir singing some songs, at the end, the kids got to join them and sing a few songs.  they were SO cute!  And Tyson did great and knew most all of the words to the songs (and I could even hear his cute little voice singing).

Here’s a little snippet of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.  He get’s VERY into it about 1/3 of the way in.

Last night I was playing with a fun little technique on how to get “shaped” bokeh.  This was a good learning experience for me because for the first time ever, I had to manually focus.  But it was SO cool!  I’m trying to figure out what other shapes I could do…

This was just a starburst sort of shape

This was my attempt at a snowflake shape, but clearly, I need to work on my snowflake cutting skills…maybe Tyson can help me!

And last, but not least, Christmas tree bokeh!

So, what do you think?

This will probably be the last year that we’ll be in our little house for the Holidays (more to come on that soon I’m hoping!)  So, it was very bittersweet digging out all of our Christmas stuff.  We are taking it easy this year and I’m not putting up my Christmas in the City village, but it will definitely be up in our new house next year.   Tony was VERY happy to be digging everything out of the crawl space for the LAST time.  He only said maybe 15 curse words this year instead of the usual 50 or so

Tyson was AWESOME at decorating the tree this year.  As you may recall last year, he concentrated the majority of the bulbs in ONE spot on the tree.  But this year, he was a decorating rock star and even wanted to put the star on the top on (which I tried to let him help with, but it’s Swarovski, man!)

Here’s Tyson hard at work and VERy focused

And since his Daddy was making weird faces and poses for the camera, guess who else had to do it??!

And I’m SO proud of myself for taking all of these without any flash (yay, me!)

More focus and concentration…

That smile…and my attempt at getting some Xmas tree bokeh!

What the Princess thinks of our Xmas tree…let’s pray she doesn’t start crawling until after it’s all down because then I think she’ll LOVE it!

And I’m in LOVE with our new stockings that I splurged on this year.  And it was awesome to finally be able to use the 5th stocking holder that I’ve had for the last 5 years

Had SO much fun taking this pic, I’ve always wanted to get one with the “glow” of the Christmas Tree.  It took my tripod and lots of test shots, but I LOVE it!

It’s been so awesome getting these annual ornaments, someday I’ll have a whole tree full I hope!