Happy Halloween!!!

It's late on Halloween night, but I couldn't let the day go by without wishing everyone a Happy Halloween, and posting a picture from today! I'll be back later this weekend with a more in depth post of our day, with lots more pictures...but for now...it's time to go to bed! Good night!

Working Hard on Focus

As you all know, I've been trying to learn as much about photography as I can, so I can improve my pictures. Well I've been having a huge problem with focus with my camera. It's been driving me crazy all the out of focus pictures I end up taking. So this morning I decided to give manual focus a try. I had fun playing around with it, but I don't think it's the solution to my focus problems. Lily moves far to fast for me to continually be refocusing myself. Our cat Ouija was a much better model for practicing manual focus! She stayed nice and still!

Still not perfect, but getting there:
Much better focus. I had my aperture opened as wide as it goes, so there is a very small depth of field, one eye is in focus, other is slightly out of focus. (please correct me if my understanding is wrong! Trying to learn here!) :

I did get a couple of Lily in focus. Probably just luck though. Ouija had climbed into an empty box of diapers, and Lily was determined to join her:



I'm working on it. I know I still have a very long way to go...but I'm having a lot of fun learning!

I've have a one more picture for you from last week. Last Friday we had some crazy wind all over the state. Our power ended up going out for a few hours. So of course we broke out the flash lights and candles. Lily was really excited for some reason. She was blindly running around the apartment laughing and was fascinated by the flash light! We all had a good time just hanging out as a family reading stories by flash light, and cuddling in bed.

Sea Scare

Last night we went to Sea Scare at the aquarium with our friends Becky, Jon, and Kyan! We took Lily last year when she was only 2 months old, and we knew then that she was going to enjoy it so much more this year! She really loved getting dressed up in her skunk costume, and running around the aquarium showing off! Kyan dressed as the cutest elephant I've ever seen. He's relatively new to walking ( 3 weeks to a month I believe?) so his walk resembles an elephants right now, so his costume was so fitting! It was adorable! All we heard all night was "Oh...look at the baby skunk! Look at the elephant...Oh they are so cute!" The kids loved the attention.
Lily also really enjoyed trick or treating for the first time. They had employees throughout the aquarium giving out candy. Lily really enjoyed opening her goody bag for them. She loved holding onto the bag all night period! She wouldn't put the thing down!

Lily's very first time trick or treating (sorry the picture is crappy):

Walking around, bag in hand of course:

We all enjoyed how the aquarium was decorated, and all the fun things they had going on. The who park is light up with pumpkins, and most fish displays had some sort of decoration.

This was our favorite pumpkin:

Underwater pumpkins:

Pirates!

One of the fun things they do is underwater pumpkin carving in the main tank. It's so interesting to watch. Did you know fish like to eat pumpkin? As the chunks are carved away, the fish will eat them!


Here are a couple pictures of us with Lily, enjoying our night. Of course you can see...treat bag in her hands in both!



At the end of the night, the kids got tired. Who wouldn't after running around for almost 3 hours!
Time to go home:

I know this is an event we will continue to love throughout the years!

14 Months Old

Dear Lily,
You are learning more and more each day! I'm so impressed with your under standing of the world around you now! In this past month you have been working hard at figuring out the things around you. You've figured out that you can climb into boxes, you've figured out that chairs are for sitting, phones are for talking, buttons are to be pressed, and doors are to be opened. Just in the past few days you learned how to turn the TV on and off by pressing the button on the TV. You know exactly which button to press to get your desired result! You also started imitating me by blowing on your food in the past few days. I don't know if you know that you do that to cool food down, but you like to blow in things now.

Today you learned about falling leaves. When I took you out for our photo shoot, you saw a leaf caught up in the branches of a tree. You were determinded to pull it down!
After getting it down and examining it, and other leaves for a while, you tried to put it back on the tree! Seeing that I knew you had made the connection that leaves go on trees! It's amazing to see you figure these things out!

This month we started bringing you to the Little Gym. You really like getting to socialize with the other kids each week, and love exploring the gym. You really love doing forward and back and rolls now. At home you bend over with you hands on the ground and wait for me to come over and flip you, then you stand back up with a huge grin on your face and clap for yourself!
You are such a ham!

I already wrote last week about all the words you have. I think you might have a few more right around the corner. I heard you say "hey" today, and yesterday you said something that sounded close to shoes while I was putting your shoes on. You haven't repeated it though. You still say Uh Oh and baby all the time. I'm working on teaching you bottle, juice, and Lily now.

I can't believe how far you have come in the last month! I'm really proud of everything you do! Keep growing and learning monkey! We love you!

Love,
Mommy

The photo shoots for this month didn't go to well. Here is the only nice shot I got:
Lily checking out the leaves before trying to put them back on the trees:

To make up for the bad photo's from this photo shoot, I'm going to post a few from last week that I took I Lily in her Halloween costume. I was going to save them for Halloween, but oh well!

Lily, the cutest skunk around:


My new favorite picture of Lily:

Tonight we're going to Sea Scare, expect to see pictures from that soon. Another busy weekend for us!

14 Months

Normally I'd be doing Lily's 14 month post today, since it is the 22nd, but I'm having trouble getting a good shot of Lily today...something worthy of posting at least! This picture sums up the photo shoot, and our day:
Lily has caught a cold! Poor thing has a runny nose, is all stuffed up, and is really fussy! I think today we'll just get in some extra cuddles, and try again tomorrow!

Don't miss the Old Sturbridge Village post below!

Old Sturbridge Village

On Sunday we went to Old Sturbridge Village. It's so beautiful there this time of year with all the leaves changing colors. We decided to ditch the stroller and let Lily run around and lead the way for whole day. It was really fun (and tiring) letting her have control of what we did for the day!
We started our visit in the visitors center. They have a fun little play area for kids there.


Once we got out to the village, Lily lead the way to one of the old time games laid out for visiters to try. It was a game with hoops and sticks. Your are suppose to use the sticks to throw and catch the hoop...but Lily thought it was a better idea to use the hoop as a hula hoop! She got so upset when we had to take it away from her for we could move on!

We moved on to check out one of the gardens. Right now the village is harvesting all their root vegetables. We found out from one of the costumed workers that they feed off of the vegetables from the farm all year long. They store the vegetables in the cellar storage, and cook them into a vegetable boil most days during th winter. We found this huge carrot funny!


After wondering around for awhile, Lily stopped to look at the saw mill. For some reason she though it was so funny, and started yelling and laughing at it! Here she is giving the mill an earful:


Taking a closer look:

Next it we followed Lily over t the waterfalls. She was really enoying bing in control of where we went!


She had fun watching the sheep, and of course people watching too (her favorite thing to do I think!)

After watching the animals for a bit, we took a break from walking around, and let Lily play in a bunch of leaves. She really had fun digging down to the ground and picking through the leaves!



Back in the main area, Daddy showed Lily how to pump for water:

And one last picture of the giant leaf and Lily being silly:

The Most Sincere Pumpkin Patch

We had another busy busy weekend over here! It's that time of year were we have stuff scheduled left and right. Saturday was pumpkin picking day! We met up with Becky, Jon and Kyan, and they took us to a really great farm to get out pumpkins. The farm had a petting zoo with goats, cows and pigs, hay rides, and a playground for the kids. Then there was the pumpkin patch, which was the biggest I've ever seen! This is just a small part of it:
The hay ride took us through some really gorgeous scenery, and dropped us off at on of the smaller pumpkin patches. We chose to not pick our pumpkins there, and waited till we got back to the bigger patch. We let the kids wander around the wagon full of hay instead. I think it was nice for them to fall and not get hurt at all!

Kyan on the hay ride out to the pumpkin patch:
Lily enjoying the view:
The whole group (minus me) on our way back to the farm:
Lily entertaining every on the wagon:


After the hay ride we walked down to the bigger pumpkin patch and looked for the perfect pumpkin to bring home. The kids had fun wandering around looking at all the bright orange pumpkins.

The boys being silly with the kids. It was cute, they were holding hands like this!

Daddy found the perfect Lily sized pumpkins!
After we had our pumpkins we stopped by to visit with the baby cows. This one cow was so sweet! She gave Lily lots of kisses, and really took an interest in her shoes!

It was a fun day all around! Tomorrow I'll try to do an update from the rest of the weekend, when we went to Old Sturbridge Village.

UH OH

I got Lily saying Uh Oh on video this morning, so enjoy!

Full Lily Update

Finally I have the chance to give a full update on how Lily has been doing! She's got a few new things since last week. First off, Lily cut two more teeth on Friday! Poor thing has been teething for a while now. She's been fussy, drolling up a storm and having crazy full diapers...all signs of teething. Now I know why, with the poor thing getting in two teeth at once...and they are the molars to boot. Top back molars on both sides.


Lily learned a couple new words this past week. All week she's been walking around dropping things then saying "Uh oh". It's the cutest thing I've ever heard. Last night she just kept repeating it over and over again...so adorable! I need to get this on video soon. Then on Friday she learned to say "yes". Everything was yes this, yes that! She also said "Becky" once, but hasn't said it again. So her list of words she can say include: duck, hi, cat/kitty, dog, baby, thank you, ta da, uh oh, yes, eyes, Daddy, and Mommy/Mom. It's incredible to me how she's really starting to understand things, and is able to communicate with us now! Just last year she was just learning how to hold her head up...now look at her!

This is her new rocking chair. She spends a lot of time in it back wards (see below), or standing like the picture above. She keeps me busy keeping her safe! She's such a dare devil. She's become quite the climber. She can get into and off all the chairs in the house. I think she's trying to give me a heart attack, with the way she climbs and runs every where. I can't tell you how many times she's been running and trips over her feet and falls. She never really hurts herself, but she gets a shock and cries. It doesn't slow her down though!

The last picture I have is Lily and Kyan in a shopping cart car from Friday. They both had such a fun time "driving" though th store together! They are such good friends!