Parade...

On Sunday, Dec. 5th our town had it's Christmas Parade. It was sooooo cold that Gracie only made it about 20 minutes then she headed to the car with her daddy. I braved the cold to get a couple shots of Santa for her and Jai. Jai fell asleep on the way there, and slept through it all...even with all of the firetrucks and police cars blaring their sirens right in front of us. He didn't move..haha.

Cute fire truck...

Gracie didn't like waving to everyone...but knew she had to if she wanted the goods (candy). :)

Cute little dancers. Yikes...I can't imagine what their little legs must have felt like in those tights...brrrrr!

Yay! Santa! Then I ran for the car...haha!

Family Portraits 2010

I was saving these until Christmas time...as a gift for my family. However, my mother was searching through my friend Ashley Stone's blog and stumbled across them. :-(

So, I have decided to go ahead and share them!

We had these taken the first week of November. We have never had family portraits done by a true professional. We had them done once at a chain store when Jai was born (boring)! We are very happy with the way these turned out! Our photographer was Ashley Stone...whom I mentioned in the last blog. She is wonderful and so sweet. We are (Paul and I) pretty uncomfortable when it comes to posing/smiling for pictures...and she told us exactly what to do, etc.

If you are interested in getting pictures done by her...her blog is astonephotos@blogger.com

I hope you enjoy! :-)

It's beginning to look like the Holidays...

On Saturday, we went and got the kiddos pictures taken at my friend Ashley's studio. She is an EXCELLENT photographer! She has the cutest Christmas themed bedroom set up in her studio! She has such a good eye for these picture layouts, etc. Chrissy, Liam, and Mary Catherine went also, and had their pictures made. We all had a great time!

Ashley was kind enough to help me with some settings on my camera...and wow! It made such a difference (as you can tell from the picture below). This was also taken with her flash attached to my camera (hubby, I need one of those also!). She is so kind to take time to quickly explain some basics about my camera. Thank you Ashley! Be sure to check out her blog at

http://astonephotos.blogspot.com/

We bribed Jai with a sucker! He did an awesome job. It's amazing what a sucker can do!

Her studio is upstairs at this cute building. I really wanted to look through the cute shop in the downstairs area...but Jai was running around like a crazy person. Maybe next time!

As soon as we got into the car to leave, it started snowing! The forecast was only calling for flurries...so we were surprised to get 1.5 inches! It was gorgeous.

We were supposed to go to the parade...but the snow was really wet, and I knew that we would have been miserable. We will be going to the Rural Hall Parade at 2:30 today instead. The kiddos are pretty stoked!

I was so excited from the things that Ashley showed me on my camera, so I went home and snapped some photos.

It was the perfect snow. Just enough to enjoy looking at...but not enough to keep us home. :)