{July} 10 on 10: A day in the life

My ten pictures all from today capture a fairly typical day in our life. Nothing exciting, but it's all about capturing the everyday moments, as opposed to the big events.

We wake up and get ready for work and school, and head out the door dropping Puppy and a paci at the top of the stairs on our way out.



We don't have a perfectly clean, organized home, so beds are left unmade.



I come home to a huge pile of dishes that need to be put away.



I make dinner, usually something super easy. Tonight, it was Pinterest to the rescue with Parmesan chicken bake. (Side note: it was good, but next time I'll reduce the seasoned salt and mayo/greek yogurt mixture just a tad.)



Then we eat. Aidan has a problem with me taking his picture (typical), Lorelai happily eats (typical) although she spent the rest of dinner tonight on my lap (not typical), and Logan gets a stomach ache and throws up (not typical, but unfortunately not the first time--he's a thrower-upper).



After we get dinner cleaned up, the boys play Star Wars Wii (sometimes it's a show, sometimes they play). Tonight, Adam showed them how it was done, and even unlocked a super cool new character.



Lorelai and I head upstairs to get ready for bed. She goes potty (no pee tonight, of course).



She plays in the bath for a while. Tonight, she played happily. Sometimes, she freaks out and gets me wet trying to crawl out.



We read a story while the boys shower and get ready for bed, and then it's lights out for her.



I read to the boys and have a one-on-one chat with them, and then we say goodnight.



And then I shower and Adam and I veg on the couch watching TV for a few hours. More dishes sit on the counter, toys are strewn across the living room floor, the desk is a complete mess. But I'm not moving until the next episode (we're on season 2, episode 4, no spoilers!) of The Walking Dead is over, and then I'm going straight to bed, ready to do it all again tomorrow. (Preferably without the throwing up!)

{June} 10 on 10: Toes and bikes

It's June 10, time for my monthly 10 on 10 photo challenge where I force myself to get out my DSLR instead of the iPhone for a change. With instagram and the fact that my phone is always on me, I've been relying on that so much more these days to capture the everyday moments. I love my phone for convenience (and I'm addicted to instagram), but I also love my nice camera and I really like the practice I get in manual (well, I use AV priority most of time).

These are moments I captured from our time outside yesterday morning, just me and the kiddos while Adam's out of town.

Love her cute toes and cute shoes.

I'm also digging my new polish, although the orange (Sonia Kashuk's Tango Mango from Target, it's a LOT brighter in person) is out of my comfort zone. Can't wait until I can paint Lorelai's toes to match mine :)


Now that Logan's finally riding his bike without training wheels, the boys have so much fun riding together. Today they just circled the cul-de-sac over and over in a "race" while Lorelai watched.






Mr. Cool needed his shades.
 

Logan is so proud of his new bike-riding abilities.


I just can't get enough of this sweet face. Those cheeks. OMG.

And Lorelai just can't get enough of her inch worm (and her trike, and the stomp rocket, and the tennis rackets, her push toy, the pink car, the pool noodle...she gets them all out every time we go outside).





So now I'm starting to think I should have picked a monthly photo challenge with a more structured theme, because I could do pretty much this same post tomorrow with the pictures I took today. Oh well, maybe next year. If nothing else, it's motivation to get my camera out and actually use it! I do like that it's only on a monthly basis so I'm more likely to be able to follow through for the whole year.

{May} 10 on 10: Flowers

Ok, so technically this is a 10 on 31, but at least it's still May (barely)! On May 10, I was still in lazy post-vacation mode so I totally spaced on my montlhy photo challenge. Well I was just going through my Spring 2012 folder and came across these photos from the zoo that I never shared (since I already had 4,792 photos in that post already), so for the sake of following through with the monthly challenge I wanted to share these.

All pictures are from the NC Zoo back in March (so I'm kind of cheating a little, oh well). I have no idea what any of these flowers are, except for the bamboo and cactus, which aren't even technically flowers. Ha!





















Except for the cactus (which needed more saturation) and the bamboo (my focus was not centered so I did a lomo effect to try to disguise it), all of these are SOOC (unedited). I just love looking at pretty flowers, so these pictures make me happy :)

{April} 10 on 10: Easter

For this month's 10 on 10 challenge, I'm sharing some pictures from Easter.

These are the little things that made it feel like Easter to me. Egg dying, egg hunts, flowers, bunnies, plastic eggs, fancy decorated eggs, the table set for ham, lamb and other yummy things...

My mom's old hand-painted eggs that were made by a family friend before she was born. Gorgeous and extremely fragile!

Our first experience dying eggs ourselves. We attempted to marble dye them by
adding oil to the dye, but ours didn't turn out like the picture on the box...

The boys, however, were very proud of their creations!

These are not hard-boiled eggs. My plan is to blow them out and save them for decoration next year.

I love how my doodle eggs turned out! I just blew them out and dried them really well, then went to town on them with a sharpie, with no real plan at all. The blue one I dunked in the dye while I tried to plug the holes at the ends with my fingers.

Simple floral centerpieces on our Easter tablescape.

This little guy says "Somebunny loves you."

This petunia had three eggs hidden in it. Only this one was found without help. Sneaky bunny :)

No one found this one either, even though I was taking a picture of it.

Sweet hands holding yummy treats. Lorelai loved opening up each egg, dumping out the treats, then putting them all back.

I hope to have the rest of the Easter pictures posted by the end of the week. Unfortunately I'm not happy with how a lot of them turned out, so it looks I might have to do some serious editing to try and salvage some of them. I was definitely off my game with the photography this time, bummer!

{March} 10 on 10

Time for March's 10 on 10 challenge!

It was a great day to take photos. Aidan and Logan had their first tennis lesson, so Adam, Lorelai and I played on the playground while we were waiting. Maybe I shouldn't have used my 50mm 1.8 since it was so sunny outside, but I didn't feel like switching out to my kit lens (which I don't like as much). After I blew out a bunch of photos, I realized I forgot to turn my ISO down (had it down to 100 for most of these shots).

I ended up with a lot of great pics, it was hard to choose just ten! I'll probably end up sharing some more in future posts :)





Turns out, Aidan and Logan both have awesome backhands! Lorelai loved watching them and tried her hardest to push her way through the fence to get to them.











Lorelai thought the pansies were really pretty. I agree.





Our flowering Bradford pear tree is really pretty, but it stinks!



Linking up with Carly at the simple things.