Best Buds!

Here’s Ty and his best buddy on their first day of preschool this year.  I’m SO behind on shar­ing lay­outs, so stay tuned for a bunch more!

Cred­its:

Are you ready?

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?

Decking Our Halls…

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!

So Thankful!

We had a won­der­ful Thanks­giv­ing this year.  We are so lucky to have such awe­some fam­ily and friends to spend the hol­i­day with.  It was fun hav­ing another “first hol­i­day” for Bai­ley too, we’re run­ning out of them all too quickly.  This year we spent with my Dad and step-mom and my sis­ter hosted at her new, first house!  She did a fab­u­lous job and the food was all so yummy!

We attempted to get a cou­ple of fam­ily pho­tos with my tri­pod set up and I man­aged to quickly teach my dad how to use my cam­era, he did great!  Now, these are not the smi­ley, per­fect fam­ily por­trait that I had hoped for, but oh well, you take what you can get, right?  They make me smile and really show our family’s per­son­al­ity

It was an excit­ing day for B, we man­aged to get a bow to stay in her hair!  Woooo!

The mon­keys with our lovely hostess

A Dream Come True

Last Thurs­day, my step-dad took Tyson to the MN Wild Hockey prac­tice and they then got to visit with the team in the locker room after prac­tice.  For those of you that know Ty, and his obses­sion with hockey, you know what an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence this must’ve been for him.  I thought he would clam up and get all star struck, but that’s the beauty of the age he’s at, he has NO fear!  He talked to the guys and even called them by their first names, just like he’d known them all his life and hung out with them every day!

Here are a few of the high­lights from his day!

I think I need to teach Grandpa how to focus his cam­era

Sport­ing his new Wild jersey

Head­ing into the locker room

Hangin with Brent Burns

This is Nik Back­strom, one of the goalies.  He and the other goalie gave Ty a signed goalie stick!  The thing is HUGE!!!

Der­rick Boogard

Josh Hard­ing, the other goalie we have

Here’s one with the giant stick.  Good thing it’s stay­ing at Grandma’s house!

Rob­bie Earl I think?  I think he’s a new guy

Shep­pard, mommy doesn’t know his first name, so last name will have to do.

He’s so spoiled, isn’t he?