happy anniversary

yesterday marked two years of marriage for me and craig. i can't even believe it's been that long. i looks back at us as newlyweds and marvel at how different we are, at how hardship changed us, at how becoming parents made us better and fall deeper in love. these last couple months have been wonderful and we're the happiest we've ever been. i'm trying so hard to soak it all up because i know it comes in cycles, time flies, things chance, hard times come and go. but right now i'm just so glad to be in it with these two. you only get to do this life thing once and i'm determined to spend it loving as hard as i can. and i love craig SO hard. i don't appreciate him nearly enough, i don't deserve him at all, but if i keep trying maybe someday i'll come close. i wish i'd have at least 75 anniversaries to try to get it right. if not i'm just glad he agreed to spend forever with me so i can have a few extra chances.

birthday lady

i had to tell my tiny baby when we got to her auntie's birthday celebration that it was not her party but she tried to steal it anyway. she's lucky that her aunt catie loves her so much and let her get away with it. these two have such an adorable bond, i just love it's. they're too special together.

happy birthday catie, one more time, from all of us. i hope you love 19 all over the place!

sour patch kid

this little stinker pulls hair, scratches and bites. the scratches leave me with a constant parade of scabs and the biting HURTS. but darn it, when she's being sweet she's just SO crazy sweet. i've been describing her as a sour patch kid lately, first she's sour, then she's sweet. the sour drives me crazy but i just love the sweet so, so much.

we graduated up to 9 month clothes this week. so many cute summer outfits to rock, so little time.

p.s. that's strawberry, the dinosaur. he's the favorite around here, after chewbacca of course. she's likes to show him who the top dinosaur is around here. she's the top of the food chain.

m is for manual

here are some of the first few successes from my epic journey with learning to shoot in manual, unedited and in all their armature glory. long story short i spent one whole day thursday completely clueless with a full black screen and wondering what buttons helped me adjust my aperture. the next day i read about 10 helpful guides and everything just clicked. haha clicked, get it?

i find that i love the extra light a high ISO provides but i'm not a huge fan of the resulting grainy look for pictures of people [babies], i like it a little more for inanimate objects and photographing my apartment, craig doesn't like the grainy look at all. i need a fast shutter speed generally to keep that thrashing baby from looking permanently blurry so getting enough light in is a little tricky but possible with some tweaking. right now aperature is giving me the most trouble. i finally understand how it works and why and i know that most everyone these days likes having a shallow depth of feild and the nice, trendy, blurry background but i'm not sure it's my favorite look. i've always naturally composed photos so that the background didn't look too busy or cluttered and i just don't know if totally blurred is my thing yet. i'm mostly unsure about it because as far as i know at this moment the only way for me to adjust aperature is to switched from manual to apature priorety and fiddle with it and then switch back to manual to see how it looks. not exactly professional or time efficient. hopefully i'm just being dumb and haven't noticed the easy way yet.

a lot of that might have sounded like gibberish and i'm still not positive i have any idea what i'm talking about. but at least the pictures look okay, yeah? even though the aperture priority and shutter priority settings on my fabulous camera are divine i think i want to be one of those people who never takes my camera of "m," but i may go back on that and let myself use some of my cameras amazing scene settings if i need to take a picture in a hurry. seriously, how can i let 20ish perfectly constructed scenes go to waste? i just don't know if i can.