My Photography class

I've been working on my photography more and more lately, and I was lucky enough to be able to take a class with an incredibly talented local photographer--DeLeigh Kelly of Fairy Tales Fotography. Chris took Friday off so that he could be with the girls while took part in this class, so it was my "Mommy" time, too. (YAY for that!) DeLeigh took us through lots of the basic information about camera settings (aperature, shutter speed, ISO) and how to make them all work together for the best pictures with natural lighting. It was a lot of information to take in, but I already feel like I've learned so much! I need to practice practice practice now! :)

Since I need to practice, I figured I'd pull out some of Maggie's tutus and see if I could get some good pics of the girls. Here are some of the best:

This was shot at an ISO of 400 with a shutter speed of 1/50 and an aperture of 4.5.

This was shot at an ISO of 1600 with a shutter speed of 1/40 and an aperture of 4.5.

This was shot at an ISO of 400 with a shutter speed of 1/50 and an aperture of 4.2.

There are definitely things that I could do to improve, but I'm fairly happy with my first images using my manual settings. :) What do you think?

Wow, long time no chatty...

I won't even make any excuses. I'm a bad blogger. lol

Now that that's done with, let's see what I've been up to. First of all, we're moving north...not that far north--just up to the Huntsville/Madison area. Still, Chris says that it's like a whole different world up there and that it's much more like Raleigh was. YAY! :) We close on the new house on Thursday and we're moving up on July 5th. Our Montgomery house is on the market (has been for a little over a week now), so we're hoping that it sells quickly. We've had a couple of showings and one potential buyer who was choosing between our house and a different one (they chose the other one), so hopefully it will all go smoothly. We'll see...

Other news...Maggie's on her second round of swimming lessons. This is the second week of her second set of lessons and she's made SO much progress. She started off being a little nervous about the water, though she'd put her face in okay. Today we took the girls to the pool for the afternoon and she actually was able to swim about 4 feet (no swimmie wings or float belt or helping hands!!) with her face under the water the whole time! Go Maggie!!

Katie is trying SO hard to crawl. She's getting up on her hands and knees and rocking back and forth like crazy. Sometimes she just rocks and then flops right back on the floor. Other times she rocks herself backwards. About a quarter of the time, though, she actually lurches forwards! :) She's so funny. She'll get there soon, I'm sure. She's so dang happy all the time, even right now when she's cutting more teeth. I felt the third one (one of her top canines) poking through today, and the other canine should be through in the next couple of days.

Let's see, what else? Oh, Chris has been working up in Huntsville for a month now and living out of a suitcase in the Holiday Inn there. He's also been to Taiwan, which was a cool experience for him. He came home this weekend and the girls (and me) were so so happy to see him. He pretty much spent the whole weekend with the girls so I'm sure he's exhausted, but it was really good for them. Tonight before bed, Maggie even asked him to read a story to her, which is out of the norm--that's been my job for the last 10 months or so. We enjoyed having Daddy back here for a couple of days. :)

I've been busy, too, but I'm going to tie up this post and be back in a second with a new post about what I've been doing. :) Thanks for reading if you've gotten this far!

DUDE! Here I am!

It's been pointed out to me that I'm a blogger slacker. LOL Like you're surprised... Here I am with an update. The kiddos are growing bigger every day. We had their well check visit yesterday (Kate 6 months and Maggie 3 yrs...even though Maggie's 3.5 already. Like I said, I'm a slacker!). Maggie is up to 41 inches and 38 pounds. That's off the chart for height (like she has been) and about 80% for weight. Not bad. Turns out that the nose ouchie from a few weeks ago probably wasn't a broken nose after all, so yay about that, too.

Miss Kate is up to 19 pounds 12.5 oz already and 27.5 inches. That puts her firmly in the 95% for both weight and height...right where Maggie was at this age. Munchkin has two teeth already (bottom center) and is working on her top two front teeth, too. She's got all the parts of crawling but just can't put it together yet. One of these days.

Let's see...other news. We're moving! We're moving to the Huntsville/Madison area. Chris is already up there working (actually, he's in Taiwan right now for the rest of the week). We went up there the first two weekends to look for houses and he came home the 3rd weekend. He was traveling last weekend, but he'll be back here this weekend. I'm sure he'll be exhausted, but I've been here with the girls for 2 weeks by myself, so he's going to be pulling some definite Daddy duty when he gets back. I contacted a realtor today about putting this house on the market, and I've been spending every spare minute working on getting stray things packed up, getting this house decluttered, and trying to get it ready to sell. I'm exhausted. Whew!

With all of that, not many time for pictures of late. Even less time for scrapping! I did take a few pictures of Katie the other day, so let me share those quickly.

My happy girl:


I love this cheesy grin:


"Talking", as usual (she's going to be chatty like her sister, I think):


And just being a cutie:


ok. I'm off to try to get some stuff done. Hope you all have a great day!!