the beach: my favorite field trip
the thought of september immediately conjures up images of backpacks, notebook paper, and pencils. (i would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if i knew your name and address...) we have begun our school year here at home as well, and i will most definitely be sharing more about that later. (later as in next week or as in next year... we'll see!) thanks to the lingering warm temperatures that are a trademark of living in the south, we still have the beach on our mind in september! we finished our school week last week with a great field trip to the surf and the sand. because it's been a few months since our last visit there, this was amelia's first time ever to walk on the beach! she was more perplexed by walking in the sand that i thought she'd be, and i enjoyed watching her take each deliberate step. 
my favorite pictures from this day are these of all three of my babies. i think these are the first i have of all of them together at the beach. amelia is getting way too old too fast. 
look at amelia in this next one. she has a lollipop for the first time (i think), and she knows she has arrived. i love how she is looking at ethan to say, "i got one too!" 
she seriously giggled the whole time she gripped that lollipop stick...
ethan found a comfy spot to watch the storm brewing on the horizon.
after the kids finished their lollipops, they discovered that the sticks made great writing tools! i was tickled at ethan, who tried his best to get close to the sand without really getting close to the sand. 
the beach spreads for miles and miles, and these cousins chose to draw on spaces less than 3 inches away from each other. 
aaaaaand i'm not surprised.... 
in no time, the three cousins were happily frolicking in the water. we spent lots of time in the waves this day... the kids brought their boogie boards and had a ball!
when the thunder grew louder and the skies darker, we decided it was time to head home. we had no sooner gotten the van packed, the kids showered, and everybody loaded up when the rain came.
it has not rained a single day in september, and it would come down on the day we decide to go to the beach! but the looming clouds were a welcome relief from the sun, and we enjoyed our not-so-sweltering day. the temperatures are beginning to signal that it is sort-of-kind-of fall, but i'm hoping we can get back out there before we break out the pumpkins and candy corn!
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7 comments:
I so get your reference to "You've Got Mail". That movie just makes me smile :)
I get the reference too! And I wanted to immediately offer up my name and address for you. :) The pictures are precious, as always.
Oh, I can't wait till you blog about school! I've been on a mission lately to read up about homeschooling and am seriously considering it for B.
Emily, i have asked you this before but what camera do you have and do you edit them? and if you do, with what software? they are AMAZING. I am so jealous! i wish I lived close to you so you could photograph my kids (and so we could hang out!).
melanie
melanie, thank you so much for your sweet words about my pictures! i have so much fun clicking away with my kiddos as my subjects. :) i have a nikon d60. it is not a fancy-shmancy camera. it IS a dslr (not a point and shoot), which intimidates some people, but honestly... i usually leave it on auto and let the camera work its magic. it has lots of settings to fiddle with, and i do change it up a little, but i mostly leave that to brian to have fun with. nikon does not make the d60 anymore, but you can get it from somewhere in cyberspace i am sure. there are newer and still reasonably priced models i can recommend as well when my electronic-researcher-hubby gets home. one of the main differences to me between a dslr and a point and shoot is that the dslr is fast, fast, fast to capture pictures... so you actually GET the shot you were wanting vs. saying "aw man!" as isaac runs away. i know that's happened to you b/c it used to happen to me all the time.
as far as editing goes, i don't use any fancy software. i own photoshop elements, but i'm usually too lazy and too impatient to use it (my version runs slow!). i have a macbook, so i use iphoto to do some basic, basic editing... cropping, slight sharpening, and retouching (ME mostly!!! and boos on the kids). i would guess that most computers come with a basic photo editing program. (i crop almost every. single. picture. cropping makes SUCH a difference... whether it's to clean up the picture or to get someone's random leg out of it... or to really draw the eye to the focus of your picture.) sometimes i kick the saturation up a notch to make the colors a little brighter..... i did saturate some of the beach pictures in this post just a little because it was a really cloudy day, and the water looked gray! i know am guilty of saturating a picture too much... but it's so fun to make those colors pop. :) my one NON-recommendation for photo editing would be picassa, which is put out by google i think. in my experience, picassa DE-saturates the pictures, making the colors look less vibrant and blah. that's just my opinion, so take it or leave it. i know folks that love picassa, but me? not so much.
ok, that was probably WAY more info than you were wanting, but you were asking ME, so i'm sure you weren't expecting me to say "d60, iphoto." :) haha.
i love blogs so that i can keep up with friends like you. i always come away from reading your blog posts with a smile on my face or with a big laugh. your kids are so beautiful, daniel is hilarious as i well remember him to be, and you obviously are taking such joy in your motherhood. even in these crazy crazy days!! you often write what i have been thinking! :) maybe one of these days we'll get to hang out and our kids will get to play together. that would be fun and insane all at the same time, i am sure. holler if you have more camera questions. brian lovvvvvvves talking cameras. :)
ok, nichele, jane, page, and melanie... if you subscribed to my comments... sorry about the bombardment there of that last comment three times!!!! blogger said it was too long, so i kept trying... and then it ended up posting my original (too-long) comment anyway! i agree it was too long! :) ha!
melanie, brian says to get the nikon d3100! it's been out a couple of months (i think), and he says it's what we'd buy if we were buying a camera right now. it has hd video (i would LOVE that) and lots of other great features. click here to read about it on nikon's website, and click hereto read about it on amazon. hope that helps!
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