Warm Fuzzies

Seeing pictures of my family like these gives me warm fuzzies.

 My sister Sherry makes the best grandma

Blessed.

There's just too much man in this picture for me to process.

Looking Through Some Old Photos

Well, not "old" per se, just not new.

June 2011.
Lots of great things happened in June that I documented with my camera. It's times like these that I'm grateful for my camera-journal. I forgot half of this stuff even happened, let alone that they all happened in June!

• Family portraits of the Ploeger Family (not pictured below)
• Girls Camp (not pictured below)
• Company golf tournament (not pictured below)
• Katie and Eric's wedding (not really pictured below...just shots of the temple)
• 1-year birthday party at Rock Canyon park (for June, I think)
• A visit from the Vic & Mona fam (shots on the Heber Creeper)
• Haskin family campout (this technically happened in July, since it was for the 4th of July, but it's in my June pictures folder, so I'm keeping it on the list)

Salt Lake Temple

Salt Lake Temple...AT NIGHT

That's Jeff and Dan making it a team effort to roll down the hill. And if you want to see some seriously sweet hill-rolling daring, check out Jeff as he takes a head-first leap down the hill, Princess-Bride style!

I call this: Waiting For A Train That Will Never Come

But mainly that's because they were waiting for the "men" to finish buying the tickets, and because the train was on the other side of the station, so technically, it never would get to where they were.

Playing an intricate game of dirt bingo. The rules are top secret, so I'll only say that it involves shovels, two toy cars, and a banana. And I've already said too much.

This is a still from Look Who's Talking 3.

And if you believed that, wait till you see my still of Home Alone 5.

Family, Food, and Fireworks!

Here are some shots from my day today. Minimal explanations needed.

My niece Becca got baptized today! This was taken at the family potluck at Sherry's house afterwards.

Apparently Paul can't look normal in any photograph, ever.  Chris is working on helping him with that. ;)

At dinner earlier this evening.  Unfortunately it's out of focus, but Dad did his usual dinner trick with balancing one fork off the knife another fork.

Sparkler parade!

Accidentally over exposed the photo, but I got a cool shot out of it!

365 Reject #1

365 Reject #2

Family & Weddings

My nephew Paul got married on Saturday. 

I didn't take many pictures of the wedding party because it felt rude piggy-backing on the hired photographer's gig.  So, mostly I walked around taking semi-candids of the family that was waiting for their turn to get in the real pictures.

I got some great shots...most of which will be in a later post. But for now, here are some of Paul's family (my sister's family)

While we were waiting for the happy couple to exit the temple, a few of us hung out on one of the lawns at temple square.  Those have to be my favorite shots, so of course I won't be sharing them until I've touched them up and branded them first.  Here are the few I've already fixed.

The family group of Dave and Ashlie above is a great sequence.  All I wanted was a close-up of the family, but baby Lauren didn't want to be there at that moment, and Dave was distracted with Lauren.  Hence, each shot I got of them had neither Dave nor Lauren looking at the camera.

Beautiful capture of a loving family though!

More to come...

Family Pizza Night: May Edition

We had pizza night at RoseAnne's house this month, and it was so much fun!  Even though my voice isn't back yet from my illness, I still had fun trying to talk over the pleasant cacophony of the family visiting with one another.  It was potluck, so we all tried to bring something to the dinner.

I brought my car.

Not edible, I know, but then again...I live with Grandma, and she needed a ride, and she brought half the food...so really, my car was quite invaluable.  The food was great, the company even better...and the kids...

Well, we all know I'm a sucker for babies.  They can wrap me around their tiny little pinkies with just one look.  Check out theses gems of my great-niece, Esther.  I SWEAR she was absolutely POSING for these shots.  She would make the faces a split second before the camera clicked, and then demand that I show her how it turned out on the LCD screen!

She's two, by the way.

Easter

I didn't really "celebrate" Easter this year...at least not in the sense of the Easter Bunny.

But my brother and his family did come over to watch conference with us and dye a few Easter eggs.  Of course, I forgot to get a single shot of the cool eggs we colored, but I did get these awesome shots of my niece after she rubbed easter egg all over her face:

Priceless.

I'm a little behind on posting my photos...I'll try to get March's pics out before the end of April.

Here are the shots I took at my great niece's birthday party back at the beginning of March.  She was so cute and had so much fun opening her presents!  (She's the one in pigtails)  I just love these kids!

I know I've already posted a Polorid wall, but it's my current favorite form of getting my pictures out, so you'll probably see it again.

These are my two favorite shots of the birthday girl:

Family

I love my family!  A couple of weeks ago we had a little get-together with all the family living in Utah.  We never get together like this because there's a lot of us, so it was super fun to see everyone!  I took a few choice shots of the evening, and here are some of my favorites (more to follow):

Generation Gap

Kicks and Giggles

Family Time

My Christmas

Sadly, I hurt my back on Christmas morning, so I took a sparse amount of pictures during my 10-day break.  Still, there's something to be said of minimalistic photography...

I may not have taken many, but I got a few good ones (when they weren't blurry):

Us on Christmas morning eating our huge breakfast before opening presents! (BEFORE I hurt my back)

Baby Lauren's first exposure to Christmas Crackers (her parents' as well, I believe).

I love babies in big hats...and they usually like them too!

My brother James and his family came to visit the week after Christmas, and his youngest son was a crack-up.  Here's one of my favorite shots of William watching The Iron Giant for the first time...CLASSIC!

I never got any good shots of James and Rachel, or many of their kids, but this one of James makes me laugh (and actually, Christine took it):

Babies are So Cute!

My Niece Lauren...

I know I've already posted pictures from her 1st birthday, but I was going thru my hard drive today and found these gems:

For a 1-year-old, she sure did enjoy opening her presents!

Visiting Family

So...in the theme of the Yosemite trip, I'm posting the choice shots I took while we visited James and Rachel's family in Patterson. Again, this is out of order because we hit Yosemite first before visiting family, but these are the shots I got to editing first, so there you go.

After we arrived Saturday afternoon and had lunch at James' house, we all took a field trip to the local corn maze and pumpkin patch in Patterson. The original idea was to pick out pumpkins for the kids to carve, but after paying admission just to walk through the 'gate', we ended up just playing around with all the fun things they had for kids. First up was the giant pyramid of hay bales that the kids immediatey ran to when we arrived:

After conquering that 'hurdle' the kids made a b-line for the kids maze made out of hay bales.  The hay bales were tall enough for the smaller kids to actually navigate blindly through the maze and small enough for the older kids to climb on and play leap frog with each other.  It was so fun to watch all the kids try to jump from one "wall" to the other.  There were a few misses, but no injuries...and they had a blast. 

Pooped!

Here's my favorite shot of Josh leaping across a larger gap in the hay walls, while his younger brother Will sat staring into the sunset with what can only be described as a casually unaffected demeanor.

Priceless!

After a few more falls and some pretty cool sucessfull leaps, the kids moved on to the 'sandbox' of corn kernals (pictures to follow in another post).  While most of the children gleefully stuffed their shirts full of the feed corn in the boxes, James took little Will to the pyramid to race to the top...

James, being the awesome dad that he is, made a very convincing attempt at beating Will to the top without actually beating him there. 

The king of the mountain shot was awesome!

[Insert sarchasm font here] Then came time for the much-anticipated pig races!  It's a time-old tradition at corn mazes such as this one to starve poor little piglets all afternoon and then set them loose in a track-like pen while they all run as fast as they can to the other end for their dinner.

Even if I don't belive in the game, I still enjoyed watching the kids...

All-in-all...a great day at the corn maze!