Dekker has recently learned how to stick out his tongue (usually mimicking us), and I just think it is so stinkin' cute!  He will often put his little hands up and feel his face after he does as if he's making sure he's doing it right. I love it! ^.^

What can I say? It's still winter.

My husband had been playing on the kitchen floor with our boys for a while before I had him gather them for this pic in front of the fridge.  I took some other photos of him wrestling the older boy while the younger keeps bringing him a kazoo wanting him to blow in it.  I might just have to make a collage of those for grins ^.^

On another note, I wish I'd had the baby put down the Magna Doodle, but you have to catch them while you can and that would have made him cry! I find it distracting but thought it would look awkward if I tried to edit it out :-/

I tried editing this picture at least 10 different ways before settling on what you see below.  Cyrus was heading to bed so I decided to get a photo of him in his dinosaur-themed room on his loft bed wearing his dinosaur pajamas.  I really struggled with the lighting, partly because his walls are predominantly orange and his ceiling light is dim and yellow (not until I'm typing this now did it occur to me to use a speed light >.< doh!).  One of my other pet-peeves for my photography is splotchy/uneven light on my subject's face, and that was the case with each of my pictures of him!  That and there was just too much color and busyness and yellow in the original, and the black and white and the sepia just weren't doing it for me. I know this picture doesn't "pop" (though I do like the contrast of his pjs against the rest) but I just liked the softer, more muted colors and tones, that and I felt it created a mood more suitable to bedtime.

This was one of those times that I didn't take very many pictures but had a terrible time deciding which to use not because I had multiple favorites but more because I wasn't all that happy with anything I ended up with :-/ When I viewed the pictures on my camera viewer I thought I had some great possibilities, but once I got them on the computer (days later... maybe that's why it's a good idea to upload and edit the same day! >.<) they just weren't what I'd hoped for.  One of my pet peeves for my own photography is cutting off limbs/parts or making awkward crops, and on these I don't like how I chopped his ears, and on the first I'm not sure how I feel about where I cropped his face. :-/

Anyway, I can't remember if this was a colt or a filly, but this horse and a pretty red roan filly were in the round pens behind the barn where I ride.  I really, really wanted my pictures of the filly to work because she had some lovely coloring, but I guess I'll have to try again with her later :-/  These were taken with my prime lens and I was peeking through the spaces in the pen to snap pictures (part of the reason the crops are where they are - the horses were right next to me and curious about my camera).

This is probably the closest I came to forgetting to take a picture! I was just about to go to bed, very tired, and suddenly remembered! My camera was downstairs (or missing an SD card, I don't recall) so I opted to use my iPhone, and I thought my lace black and burgundy layering top might make for an interesting close-up.  The interpretive part comes with trying to figure out what you see in the pattern, ha ha ;-) It's really a floral design but the way I had it draped makes that less obvious.

My husband and I started our dish set when we got married over a decade ago but never really completed it, so we had a solid setting for five then a mixed number of extras of different pieces. It was a nice matte black Target HOME stoneware collection, but to be honest the dinner plates drove me crazy. They reminded me too much of huge shallow bowls, and I didn't like how the juices from my dinner would all run down to the center, nor how frustrating they were to try and arrange in the dishwasher.  I personally rarely ever used a big plate for those reasons, and would only use the salad plates for my meals because they were flatter.  I also didn't like how hot the set would get in the microwave, so I frequently ended up using various other cheaper pieces we'd accumulated for that.

Anyway, after complaining for several years, I finally got around to replacing my dinnerware! These were available online only, advertised as black and beige, and I absolutely loved the look of what they had pictured.  The reviews warned me however that the color would likely be different than stated, and unfortunately they were, but I'm still happy overall.  The sets I received were more of a dark brown and tan/sage green color, but I was happy that they at least matched (I ordered 3 boxes to get 12 settings).  Even more, due to the nice FLAT bottom on the dinner plates, and the perfect sizes to everything else, I managed to fit ALL of the new dishes in the dishwasher at ONE time.  That never would have happened with my old set, at least not with this many pieces. :)

I pick my oldest up after school most days and finally thought to get a picture in the car! Don't worry, I wasn't driving at the time ;-) I also had some fun editing this one, and tried Courtney's tip of removing distractions (there had been a blurred outline of part of a house out the window that I removed).

This cabin has been on the side of this hill ever since I can remember.  When I was in my early teens they used to have a hand-painted sign out front that read "horses for sale" with a phone number, and several horses would mill around the cabin and the little stretch of level ground winding around the length of the hill.  As far as I can tell it's been abandoned for several years now, that or the town owns it as part of the open space that was surrounding it before.  The paint looks kept up but I haven't seen a car there (nor tracks in the snow) for years.  I would have liked to take my photo from a different angle, but as it was I had to find a safe spot to pull over on the highway to take this from my car window when there was a break in traffic (and I didn't have my zoom lens on my camera, that might have helped to make it more interesting too).

For Christmas 2012 I gave my mom this flowering tea set. I believe the tea is a jasmine green tea tied into "flowers." There are a few different styles of flowers but they are all the same flavor, and one of few teas that I like without sugar (yes I'm one of "those" ^.^).  I tried to position the teapot in the sunlight we had filtering through the blinds so that the light would land on the tea flower in a couple of places.