Keeping it Real : Fall Photo Shoot Slideshow

When I say we take a lot of pictures, that is a massive understatement.  We snap pictures of the girls constantly.  When we get an idea in our heads of how a picture should look, we go completely overboard on the number of pictures we take trying to get that elusive "perfect" shot.  Case in point, what is becoming our yearly picture of the girls on the decorative wagon we put out during the fall.  Last year it took seven pictures to get an acceptable pose out of Melanie and Claire, the third one being our favorite shot.  Granted, we've added another child the the mix since then.  Another kiddo to keep looking at the camera in a quasi-happy sort of way does make things a bit more complicated, but it shouldn't be 80+ pictures over a two day time span complicated.  We just tend to do that to ourselves I guess. Someday I'll get my OCD issues addressed.  Until then, I'm sure there will be more events like these happening at our house. 

The real kicker?  We ended up liking the sixth picture in the series the best :/  *Sigh*  Someday we'll stop doing this to ourselves our kids. 

(In our defense, it was pretty chilly and a heavily breezy the first day, opting to try again the next day after church)

This is how you end up with 5000+ pictures in a year.  I am SO thankful for digital cameras, otherwise we'd have to choose between sending our kids to college and having cute pictures of them, and I wouldn't completely trust myself to choose college savings over film developing if it came down to it.  After all, I am the same person that would use entire rolls of film on posing pictures of her stuffed bears as a "tourist family on vacation" as a child, thanks to my godfather giving me a camera for my 8th birthday.  Bless my parents for footing my film developing bill!

Summer Recap

 I realize I have been terribly delinquent in posting lately.  Ok, all summer.  I've been busy.  Sleeping.  And being intimidated by the growing number of pictures to go through.  My solution?  A slideshow recap of the summer (Minus our Colorado vacation.  I will get that posted.  Soon.)

So here's your peek into the summer of 2010 for the Stockemer family.

A Visit with 'chelle

This past weekend we took a quick trip to Leavenworth to visit my friend Michelle.  We left Saturday morning and arrived before lunch, so we loaded back up in the van and went to the Legends shopping center to enjoy a Cheeseburger in Paradise and some window shopping.  Neither one of us bought anything!  Aren't you proud?  (and a bit shocked?!?!)  We then went back to her house and the girls watched "The Tigger Movie" with Michelle while I (and Matt too, I think) passed out on the couch (4 hours of sleep the night before was definitely not enough!) .

After the movie was done we took the girls to a nearby park to burn off some steam.

Matt making silly faces at Claire

We then headed back to Michelle's house and Matt played grill master to the chicken, baked potatoes and corn on the cob Michelle had ready for us.

Then we went to bed.  Claire and I shared an air mattress and she spent a good portion of the night sleeping like this.

I would have to say, for the girls at least, that the highlight of the trip was Michelle's dog Beanie.  Melanie completely associates Michelle with Beanie.  Whenever I mention Michelle she immediately asks if Beanie is with her.  And on the drive home Melanie informed me that "We go see 'chelle and Beanie again tomorrow!"  Ah, if only it were that easy. 

The girls feeding Beanie some of her food

And this wouldn't be a true post about Michelle and Elizabeth if there weren't some pictures of us doing something silly, so here's a slide show of us sliding with the girls (how appropriate). Oh, and to add to our nerd quotient, we are wearing the mirror image of each others outfit - Michelle in a blue tank with a white lacy cami underneath, me with a white shirt and blue cami underneath.  Completely unplanned, of course.

Breakfast is Served!

Hide and Seek

Matt introduced Melanie to Hide and Seek yesterday, and she loves it! She's been a big fan of sneaking around and hiding recently, so the idea of an actual game centered around this activity was a real winner with her!

It was really cute to watch them, Melanie with her quick counting and gleeful searching, and Matt with his silly hiding places that Melanie would often copy when it was her turn to hide and his diligent "looking" for Melanie despite her painfully obvious hiding places that she often gave away before he "officially" found her. He even incorporated Claire into the game (she gave away his hiding place more than once!). Enjoy the slideshow of one of these simple pleasures of youth. I'm sure if you'd like to come over Melanie would be more than willing to play with you too :)

Judy and the Boys Come to Visit

So this post is mostly for Michelle, or anyone else that hasn't seen Judy and her kiddos recently.

Judy brought the boys out last week and the kids played for a while here while Judy and I tried to have some mommy chat time, which if any of you have ever tried to hold a real conversation with 5 kids under the age of 6 running around you know how challenging that can be! Nonetheless, the boys seemed to have fun exploring all the toys in Melanie's play room and seeing Claire - they were quite smitten with her!

After playing at our house for a while we headed over to my parents house for a swim. I'm really glad we got to see each other, but Judy and I both agree that we're going to have to try and coordinate a time to get together when our husbands can watch the kids and we can go to lunch and have some real girl time! I can't wait!

The slideshow in the next post has most of the pictures from their visit, but the ones below I felt needed to be posted on their own so you could see better just how big the boys have gotten - they're huge! I can't believe how much they've grown since Christmas! Anyway, without further ado, here are the pictures!

The Brown boys
Logan, Shane and Gabriel

This hat was quite the hit!

Both of the older boys wanted their pictures taken with it

Logan was really enjoying the pink stroller
I'm sure Kelly would be thrilled!

Gabe in timeout
(big surprise)

And an attempt at a picture of Judy with the boys

While these didn't turn out how we hoped, they sure are funny!

Thanks for coming over Judy - I had a blast!

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Vacation Pictures (Finally!!!)

So I realize we've been home for over 2 months now, and I'm just now getting around to posting pictures from our vacation. A combination of my normal blogging time being Melanie's nap time (and more recently, my nap time) and the fact that she somehow removed the "period" key from the computer keyboard have both contributed to my lack of motivation to blog. It wasn't until this evening, spending time waiting for Matt to call me from California that I decided to finally get around to doing it. So I posted all the pictures using the "main" computer and am now typing on the laptop, since having to use the tweezers whenever I want to end a sentence would more than likely get on my nerves using the other computer and all the pictures were already loaded on the other computer.

I broke the pictures down into two slide shows for your viewing enjoyment. The first includes pictures of the family enjoying our vacation. Somehow Matt's mom managed to avoid being in the pictures, but I guarantee she was there with us the whole time.

Just a brief summary of the events from Alaska:
-Matt and John both played in a couple Texas Hold 'Em tournaments, John won the first one, Matt took second in the one held the following day (or vice versa on their winnings, I can't really remember now - I've slept a lot since then - I just know they both won some money)
-We saw both the Hubbard and the Mendenhall Glaciers. Hubbard we saw from the boat, and the water was especially icy that day, so we were still about 5 miles away when the captain decided to turn around since it would have taken too long to get up close and would have thrown the entire schedule off. For the Mendenhall Glacier Matt, Gordon, Melanie and I went on a walking photo tour that ended with a boat ride where Matt got the nice shots of the eagles and the whale tale, as well as the pictures of the seals. This is also where a lot of the scenery pictures came from.
-As a family we went on a wildlife photo safari (along with about 50 other people). We were lucky enough to have some excellent whale watching opportunities, with a very playful whale that breached (jumped out of the water) quite a few times and just hung out playing for us. We also saw some more bald eagles, as well as the raft (group) of sea otters that are pictured in the slide show.
-Matt, John, Katie and Gordon went salmon fishing in our final port in Alaska, and they each caught at least one fish and had a good time. Matt's foot is in the picture of the fish for a size reference - leave it to him to think of that! Stacey, Melanie and I stayed on dry land and ran around shopping instead.
-We went to the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, Canada as a family, which were quite lovely. We kinda had to hurry though, since we docked at 7 pm and it was dark by around 10, so I'm sure we would have enjoyed the gardens more if we had had more time with better light. There was an outdoor concert going on while we were there, and Melanie enjoyed sitting on a bench and swaying to the jazzy music they were playing (quite a few Michael Buble' covers)
-There were crazy amounts of food! Dinner every night was 5 courses, which I normally only ordered 2-3 of since quite a few of the dishes were too adventurous for my 1st trimester stomach to try. Melanie really enjoyed the bread they brought at the beginning of the meal, and would often eat the middle out and leave the crust behind (as is pictured). She also got to try "cleansing her pallet" with sorbet between courses - we all had a cranberry-ginger sorbet, but they brought Melanie a plain one so she could be in on the fun!
-Melanie got lots of quality family time. We were normally back on the boat by 1-3pm, so there was time for a nap before dinner. Matt took full advantage of asking his family to watch Melanie so I could rest. She had a blast playing on their beds and running up and down the halls with them, and the stairs were a particular favorite. She definitely had a rude awakening when we got back to Kansas and she just had boring old mom to entertain her all day!

So that pretty well sums up our vacation. Sorry for the delay in getting it posted. Maybe if you're lucky it won't be 2 months before I post again!

Alaskan Experiences

Alaska Scenery