Playing "fireman" at the park

Okay, so having to pick my favorite to submit for Sunday Snapshot is just plain hard.  I mean, my kids exude cuteness in every shot I take, which makes it tough to pick a favorite, right?  *wink*  But if I have to choose, it's this one...because I'm in LOVE with sun flare lately.

So while down at the park, Caleb and Madeline love to play "fireman".  

They each have their own firetrucks.  Here's Madeline on one of them.

One side of the playground is the firehouse...

..complete with a slide instead of a pole.

They also have bunkbeds.  Below this tunnel is another one that actually runs perpendicular to it.  

They love to rest in their bunkbeds, which means each kid in their own tunnel.

Well, we happened to be at the park a little later than usual.  So I had this crazy idea to attempt some sun flare shots.  Sometimes I got flare and other times just haze.  It was a bit too early, though, for flare so I found myself getting really low to the ground to take the shots. Black mulch and me on the ground don't go well together.  Yuck.  Next time, I'll try a bit later in the day.

She loves to pose with her hand on her hip, all the time.

Opposite the firehouse and in close proximity to the firetrucks is the Fire Chief's house.  Apparently, he has a sense of humor.

On this particular day, there wasn't to much time for play.  They had a fire to put out and had to hurry.

Thankfully, they arrived at the scene of the fire just in time and put that fire out.  Phew!

Just before heading home for the night, I thought I would beg ask the dumplings for a few more flare shots.  I love this shot even though Madeline blinked because Caleb is pointing to the bocce ball court where they were planning on some timed races...in the Olympic spirit, you know.

They were pretty pooped after fighting fires all afternoon and running sprints.

Oh, these kids just crack me up.  I love their imagination.  I love the fun they have together.  I love that they love being together.  It makes my heart sing.  We have most definitely enjoyed our late summer afternoons at the park by the river.  Madeline's "happy" shirt just about sums it up.  Oh, and I love how exhausted they are at the end of the day.

I shot all these images with my Nikon D700 using my 50mm 1.4 lens.  Settings for the top photo were f/2.8 SS 1/1600 ISO 250.  I edited them in Lightroom 4 using One Willow presets from the Palette Collection.

For more great photos, stop by Stefanie and Rebecca's blogs.
 

Bammy's visit

As I mentioned previously, this past weekend Patrick's mother, known around here as Bammy, flew down from Connecticut to visit.  The kids just adore her.  They especially love to swim with her and splash her and get her all wet.  A lot.  

And it's non-stop silliness, too.

The night before heading back home, we stopped down at the pier to snap a few photos of the kidlets with Bammy.

They did their best to be patient with me as I tried to capture, yet again, a lackluster sunset.  

Shame on you, sunset, for not doing me any favors.

After the river shoot was done, we headed over to our local ice cream spot, Moo's.  A few weeks ago, when we were coming back from Joshua's birthday party, we drove past a big Saturday night crowd enjoying the soft serve.  Well, I knew I wanted to try to shoot the bright yellow against the dark evening sky.  So I brought along my travel tripod in order to shoot at a slower shutter speed.  

Well, the slight problem I had was that my travel tripod stands about 8 inches off the ground, which left my face practically on the pavement as I tried to check focus and exposure.  Still, I liked the perspective in the shot above.

So, we ended the evening by enjoying some vanilla with butterscotch or sprinkles.  Nothing fancy here.
Just refreshing on a hot evening.

Then, of course, the kids rode the little rides.  Always.  A couple times each, I might add.
Madeline even brought one of her wallets with change, just to be sure.

Although Bammy's visit was short, we truly enjoyed having her.  

And we're looking forward to seeing her in October for our niece, Lydia's 6th birthday.

And if you can believe it, I have another upate on our adoption paperchase.  On Wednesday afternoon, I called immigration to let them know we were printed a little early and also to check the status of our application.  Well, the officer informed me that our application was pulled and APPROVED that morning!  So, the approval notice should be arriving in our hot little hands any day.  Also on Wednesday, we overnighted most of our Florida documents to a courier in Tallahassee who will deliver them to the Secretary of State for authentication.  We've been a little slow at doing this, but we figured we still had some time as we wait for our immigration approval.  Well, now it looks like we'll be sending the courier another package next week!  So my wish to be DTC by the end of the month just may come true.

For more favorite photos, stop by Lisa's blog!

Have a fantastic weekend!

Madeline's party...in photos

As the hostess of the party, I didn't have much time to snap photos, but I was determined to catch a few of the kids enjoying themselves on the big waterslide.  Remember how I said the waterslide peeps were going to come Friday night to set up the slide?  Well, that didn't happen.  Around 5:00pm that night, we suddenly lost power....as in, we had to leave the house and eat dinner out and not come back til bedtime kinda of power outage.  That meant we had to call the waterslide peeps and tell them they couldn't come set up.  Thankfully, power was restored by the time we arrived back home, around 9:00pm.

Anyway, the waterslide peeps were running late Saturday morning.  So my hopes of enjoying the waterslide before our guests came were long lost.  We kept the guest list small on purpose- just a few friends and family. I somehow managed not to snap a photo of Patrick going down the slide.  Boo.  He really enjoyed it with the kids.  I managed to get down it once most people left. So, here are a few photos from the party. 

The kids enjoyed going back and forth between the slide and the pool.

 So glad I had my 35mm.
Otherwise I would've had to climb over the neighbor's fence to get a shot of the entire slide.  Told ya it was big!

 I was too short and too lazy to find a better way to elevate myself for the shots of kids actually coming down the slide.

 Taking a lunch break with her cousin.

 The big kids also got a turn.
My BIL Andy didn't have the same height limitation I had.  So he managed to capture a great shot of me going down with my sister.  He even caught me in the air.  And I won that race, by the way. ;)  Love ya, girl.

 Caleb really didn't want to take a break.  He was the last one to go down.

Some news on the adoption front...

We were able to walk in early yesterday for fingerprinting for our I-800A application.  Woo hoo.  I love our "local" but not so close office.  We're still hopeful we can send off our dossier by the end of this month.