November

Some random pictures from November: 

I caught Brett playing the ipad in my laundry basket like this:

Brett and Stockton are starting to be really good buddies most of the time.  ;)

Stockton gets really into the games he plays.  I had to pretend to be taking pictures of his toys because he didn't want a pic of himself.

I threw the kids and the car this day and we drove up to the bench to get this picture.  They are nice to put up with my sunset picture outings.  They are just glad I'm not taking their picture I guess.

The picture on the left is Stockton dancing to the song "sail" but Awolnation.  He really loves that song.

First snow of the season! 

 I love the colors in this picture. 

Brett picked up the snow and realized how cold it was. 

We had a mini family reunion with my Pack family.  We had a early thanksgiving dinner. These are my dad's syblings all but three.

Blake is into paper airplanes.  He one a contest in his class.

Ty is into captain underpants.  He loves these books! He draws his own comics of them too. At least he is reading so I don't care.

Painting 

I love snow storms

Thanksgiving this year we went to my parents house.  

We tried to get a group picture.  This is the best we could do with 6 little kids... and Bryan...

My attempt at a family picture on the tripod.  Everyone looked nice but Bryan.  He was the only one I had to photoshop. 

Stockton threw up on the way home from my parents house from Thanksgiving.  Yeah.  That was fun.  That fun little bug started with Blake and filtered through every single kid but it took 2+ weeks.  This is how I found Stockton the day after Thanksgiving.  Asleep- with his coon skin cap and a award Ty got from his pinewood derby around his neck. 

Our local paper asks for photo submissions every month and the month of Novembers theme was black and white.  I sent in a good number of photos but it was this one they printed:

I'm going to type what he said because I was so excited about it! "There were a lot of entries and i had a really hard time narrowing down my favorites.  I usually can edit it down to my top five pretty quickly.  This month there were 17 I though were really well done.  I ended up staring at them for quite a while before I was able to pick my favorites.  So good job to the participants.  There were two photos that stood out to me" -He then talked about the top photo of a football player "The other photo that stood out to me was by Heather Palmer, of a child sitting on the floor with Christmas lights on them.  What drew me to this was the hard contrast of the photo.  She had a really dar background good midtones and highlights.  I also liked the reflection on the lights on the floor."

Seriously I was giddy.  I feel all too often that I'm not a good enough photographer to put myself out there.  It really hurts when someone doesn't care for a photo that I care a lot about. To have a professional photographer say something like that about my photo really made me feel good.