Okay, so I'm doing a horrible job of updating the blog while on vacation. Here's what we are up to. Left Friday for Kearney, MO and had LaFuente for dinner with Tash's family. Saturday went to the Kansas side and spent the afternoon with my brother, Jon and his family. Went to eat at Jose Pepper's and shopped at Oak Park Mall.

Sunday Zeni and I spent the afternoon again in Kansas running from friend to friend. Stopped at Chad and Krista (Lefmann) Wilson's farm in Edgerton, KS for a visit. By farm I mean goats, sheep, pigs, ducks, lots of dogs and many, many cats. Next stop was in Olathe, KS where I stopped to see my friend Julie (Hansen) Buffington and her husband Pete. Julie and I have known each other since Kindergarten and she just moved to Olathe where I happened to go to college nearly 15 years ago. It was so great to see her again. Just wished we would have had more time to visit. Raced from there to 119th and Metcalf to have Chili's for dinner with Amy, another college friend. We had not seen each other for 10 years, so it was great to catch up.

Today, went shopping with SIL Tammy and MIL Darlene. We hit the new scrapbook store in Liberty, MO and Joann's (which I don't have in Oklahoma). From there we ran to the T-mobile store at Metro North mall to get Darlene a new phone. Which of course meant that I caught the bug to want a new phone. So now I'm wanting to upgrade, but will need to shop around a little first.

Tomorrow, I'll be doing some laundry to get ready for the next leg of the trip. We'll be leaving on Wednesday to drive to Sioux Falls. Going to hit R Scrapbook Store while we are in town. Thursday it's on to Spearfish for the Jevne Reunion.

I'll update again soon. Hopefully with some pictures.

I think Maren has caught the photography bug that seems to be prevalent at our house right now. She worked for a large portion of her morning setting up her pony photo shoot. Each pony just had to be facing the same direction.

Then I took a few more shots to get some closeups of Maren's dear friends. Kinda fun, and these subjects don't move, so there was no waiting for them to smile or look at the camera.

No, this is not what we did all day. Most of our day was laundry, cleaning, and packing. We're getting ready for our 2 week long trek from OK to Kansas City to Sioux Falls to Spearfish to Minot to Fargo back to Kansas City and then home. Needless to say we have to pack alot of clothes. Although it does help that we can do our laundry along the way. I will attempt to keep up the daily blog while on the road. Not sure if I'll be able to upload pictures as easily, but I shall find out. That's all for tonight.

I have not taken any pictures with the new camera now for 2 days. My family however did contribute last night and these are their results. Tash caught this...

And he caught this...

Maren took this... and yes she took it upside down.

And...Amos took this picture of Zeni.

Why do I even bother trying to learn to use the new camera? I'll just hand it over to Amos.

So, I have 2 POTDs (pictures of the day) today. The first was Tash's handiwork-Amos with the nozzle to the garden hose.

And my only decent shot today was caught while sitting at the kitchen table. I took this without looking through the viewfinder. Just clicked and got lucky. Tash at work.

Above are a few shots from Friday in the backyard. Me-playing with the camera.
And...Guess what we did today? Yes...we played with the camera again. Took the kids to the park and only captured a few shots before they got whiney and gripey. Tried to get them to sit on a tree stump and the next thing I knew both of them were bawling. Atleast I was able to leave Z at home or I would have had 3 crying. Here are some of my favorite shots.

Okay, did some major damage yesterday on amazon.com. I finally got around to ordering what I consider to be my essential photography gear: 50mm f1.4 lens, battery grip, external flash, an extra LI battery, a remote, and a bigger camera bag to put it in. Can't wait to play with it all. It's shipping from 2 different places, so one order is going to take longer to arrive. In fact, not until the beginning of July will it be delivered, so I had it shipped to KC. The second package with the most important item (my 50mm) will arrive hopefully by the end of this week or the beginning of the next. I'm so excited I can't hardly stand it!

This is what Maren and I did yesterday. Tash had some things to print up at OU so Maren and I walked around campus playing with the new camera. I'm still learning, so don't judge too harshly.



This is Maren's "Mommy, can we be done with pictures now?" look. Really needing some additional photo equipment to do what I want. Looking into a new lens, a battery grip and an external flash. Will have to sell a kidney first.

So, these are Tash's lovely nieces. They were kind enough to let me practice my photography skills on them over Christmas. And by "practicing" I mean, I'm new enough to all this that I can't seem to remember to turn off the date stamp. Duh!

It is very possible that just as I am beginning to get better about blogging, I may be opening a new site strictly for photography. We'll see how that goes.

Trying to get this blog a little more up to date. Will be working on it this summer and hopefully updating it much more often. For today I leave you with this. Maren has been my constant model while I practice with the new camera. I'm so glad that she no longer HATES to have her picture taken.