Firsts!!!

Life is full of firsts, and with children every new experience is fun and exciting. Today Carter had his first day of kindergarten! He was so excited. His teacher sent him some magic confetti in the mail with instructions to put under his pillow the night before his first day to help him sleep soundly (but I think it actually had the opposite affect). When he woke up I was shocked at how quickly he was dressed and ready to get out the door. I think it must have been some kind of record! I thought he looked so handsome for his first day of school, but then I am a little biased.

It wasn't until Carter lined up with all the other kindergartners in his class that I realized Carter is kind of short! All I can hope is that in the end the tall genes that we know are in there somewhere will win out over the short ones. :)

Carter has never been a super chatty kid, and today was no different. When I picked him up and asked him how his day was all I got out of him was one word answers. After a lot of probing I finally learned that he went across the monkey bars all on his own and had a friend push him on the swing.

I can't believe he is in school now. Not having him around all the time will take a lot of getting used to both for me and for Parker, who kept saying, "Mommy, I miss Carter."



We also had another first recently in our family. Tristan had his first birthday last month!

He was so cute trying to get a hold of his cake the whole time we sang "Happy Birthday" to him and we so rudely kept it just out of his reach.

He absolutely LOVED his cake and dove right in the second he could get his hands on it and ate just about every crumb!

This past year has gone by so quick I can hardly believe it. We love that cute boy!!!

Fun With Photomacrography

The other day I took the kids out in the Verano Garden's to search for bugs and take some fun pictures. They didn't all turn out perfectly but they are still fun to look at. I figured I would post a few here for fun

Note: photomacrography is just a fancy word for macro photography or close-up photography which usually tries to get an object to appear life-size or larger on a 4" x 6" print with no cropping or digital zoom. All the pictures seen below are straight out of the camera with no digital cropping or enhancement.

Here is a picture of a Ladybug Carter and Parker found, I love these bugs.

Carter picked up an ant and wanted me to take a picture of it crawling around on his arm. The ant was very fast and between the ant moving, carter moving his arm around, and my limited stability, I couldn't zoom in very far to take the picture. Carter really likes to look at it though.

I had to wait a while for this Dragon fly to land but I got a few good closeups

This was a big nasty bug we spotted eating someones food in the garden. This is actually a big melon looking thing and there were seriously 10 or more bugs like this guy along with tons of flies, fruit flies and some other weird bugs going to town on it.



The boys spotted several butterfly's floating around but it was hard to get in close enough to take an actual picture. This one kept flying away but if I waited patiently it kept coming back to land on other flowers around me so I finally got a good picture.



I noticed a swarm of bee's pollenating the flowers so I trudged out in the middle of the flower patch and had a lot of fun trying to get these pictures while trying not to get stung.




After we were finished we sat around on the grass looking at the pictures then I decided to get a picture of Parker's eye. I think it is pretty cool how well you can see the muscles around his Iris. If you look closely you can see me in the reflection holding my camera up to his eye.
(click on the picture for a closer look)

Check out the eyeballs on this bad-boy. It looks like a brown widow to me but I couldn't get a closeup of it's belly to be sure. (click on the picture to get a better close-up)

All these shots were taken with an 18-55 canon lens mounted backwards to the body using a reversing ring on a Canon Rebel XT camera body. It was bright enough outside I didn't really need a flash but it came in handy on a few of the shots when you want a really fast shutter speed. The depth of field is limited because with the lens mounted on backwards I lose all control over the aperture settings but most of them came out ok. It would be a lot of fun to get a dedicated macro lens (hint, hint) but for now this is good enough for me to tinker and play with.

Thanks for looking, I hope you liked them!