Peahead Prints

there is nothing better than a warm night at a carnival. i am not sure what it is about it but it is just the epitome of summer. the smells of spilled beer, burnt zeppoli’s, porta potties and ride exhaust. the rides, aka portable death devices (rides that can be easily packed up and taken around the country should not be allowed!) the waiting in line for ridiculously over priced tickets. it’s the same story every time we go. and we go ALOT. if there is a fireman’s fair within a 20 mile radius we’re there! and each time we go i wonder why.

it’s the same thing over and over. it never really changes. but the kids love it. every glow in the dark necklace is just as exciting as the first. and the routine never changes.

the girls wait anxiously. their love/hate relationship spikes during a bought of anxious boredom.

love

hate

boredom

looks like love, but i’m not quit sure

last year was the first year the girls really “got it” and they wanted to go on every ride, over and over and over and…you get the point. i was enormous and miserably pregnant last year so i didn’t get to enjoy the excitment as much. i was on official purse patrol, the entire summer!

i thought i was going to have my turn but this year the girls got to enjoy the attractions on their own. i did do the “big” slide though. do those potato sacks need to be that itchy? really? can’t we come up with something a little less harsh on the coolie and just as slippery?

they rode the typical kiddie rides. dumbo (kira has not yet been to disney world, she doesn’t know yet that it’s not the real deal…and don’t any of you tell her! october will be here soon enough!), the carousel, the monkey maze.

by chance we met up with huner and lizzie, the girls cousins. boy were they excited and just in time to fill up a tub, of fun. doesn’t look like much fun to me. looks like an accident waiting to happen.

i vaguely remember asking hunter to watch out for girls and if they wanted the ride to slow down, that HE was in charge of stopping this barf machine from spinning. he happily agreed .

apparently he did not understand what i was saying!

i saw my little precious thing spinning wildly and i got more and more nervous with every turn. but she was having fun. i bottled up the anxiety and just kept clicking.

i’ve told you that aly has a really hard time sitting still. it is very apparent that even while spinning at the speed of light, she finds it necessary to want to evacuate the tub, not out of fear, she has none, but because it might add to the fun she is already having!

good lord, she makes me nervous.

we yelled.

she listened.

just watching them made my stomach queasy. i thought for sure that would be the end of the evening. nope back to the monkey maze. 47 more times. we were surely done now. exhausted, filthy and feet aching. nope. a fair is never complete without a big ball of sugar on a stick, an hour before bedtime.

it’s sticky and almost void of any flavor at all. it dissolves before it even hits your taste buds, so why do we bother? as nasty as it i, you just have to spend the $6, take a taste and then toss 3/4 of it in the trash. and as you walk to the car, you spend 36 minutes discussing how gross it is.

then we went home. soaked in the tub and watched the filth filter down the drain. got in jammies and called it a night. i think a post fair shower is a close second to the just got home from the beach shower. i love summer. whens the next fair?

ever go somewhere, look around and just feel…old?! i did and i don’t like it! we headed out east to celebrate the high school graduation of my now college aged cousin Steve. i shutter at the thought! it feels like only yesterday that Steve, his sister Kelly and I were covered in chicken pox, from head to toe. we spent a few days laying on the couch, lifeless, drinking juice and watching the elephant show. what a summer!

it wasn’t an immediate sense of elderness. it kinda just creeped up on me. as the teeny boppers and fellow graduates rolled in, it started to hit me. even if i tried, they would all look at me as…old!

we tried. we tried real hard to fight the feeling. my hubs more than me. who do you think you are playing a college game like beer pong?

looks like you need some practice buddy. object is to get the ball IN the cup, not as far away as possible.

kelly reminded the hubs that he would in fact be considered the creepy old guy at the college party if we ever decided to take the drive to visit her at school.

i agreed!

he doesn’t seem to think so. and tried to prove it to himself and apparently everyone else that this wasn’t the truth. oh sweetie, it is soooo the truth.

leave the darn kids alone. they don’t want to hear what it was like partying in the early 90’s when seattle grunge was taking over and nirvana and pearl jam were all the rage. (p.s.-they are laughing at you not with you!)

jen tried to keep up with a quick game of badmitton. that’s going to hurt in the morning.

(i’m going to get in trouble for that one!)

hey craig…guess what? your old too!! (happy birthday by the way, to the best bro-in-law around! yet another year older today!)

we’re no longer able to sit at the kiddie table. we’ll have to stay off to the side with the “old” people. sorry mom i didn’t mean it literally. isn’t my mom the most beautiful  ever.

she has some pretty snazzy feet too! or at least she thinks so. it’s her trademark.

i’ll just sit over here with gram. she loves to chat it up. telling stories about bingo and the olden days.

to be young again. carrying kids around on your back without needing a tylenol the next day just to get out of bed.

enjoy it kids. you won’t be young forever. unless of course you are aunt lee.

she still keeps up with the kids. her constant competitive nature leaves her no rest for the weary. i mean it…she will make a game out of anything, just so she can rub it in when she wins!

thanks steve. thanks for having us at your “don’t you feel old party”. your not old yet…but i think you are old enough to lose the juice box!

good luck in all you do and have fun getting old!

i came across this site a while back and truly laughed out loud. if you have seen it you know what i mean, and if not check it out.

you will see things like this

i love my camera (alot) but i don’t think i love it as much as he loves his projector. did it really need to be included in the family portrait?

and then there are some really good ones, like this

why didn’t i think of this pose last week! sorry kelly, razickas, corsen family…we could have gotten a real doosey with all seven grand kids for Grandma!

anyone in my family, or friends who knew me during the “glasses” days who is reading this and for one second laughs out loud and even thinks of commenting and asking if this is me, i am telling you now, that it is NOT me! yes my specs were just about that size and yes i have a few dance costume shots while wearing the googles i called glasses, but this is NOT me!

brings me back to the summer of ‘87! i think mom made us stop at EVERY Disney picture spot. do they still have these spots clearly marked? i sure hope so…get ready kids, we’ll be snapping at each spot!

again, NOT me! but the typical school photo! i love it!

one last one, because i could go on forever.

i had to include it. i miss my cabbie. it’s a long story for another day. but someone stole her. never to be found again. i think i included her in my easter shots the year she was “born”.

do i find these photo’s so funny because i can relate to almost every single one of them? does it make it so much more enjoyable knowing my mother has endless photo albums of pictures just like these of our family!?

i need to get my hands on those old photo’s a start a whole site or two of my very own!

i have never in her 3.5 years of life been able to get a shot of my niece with her looking directly at me and my lens. I usually capture something like this.

or this

she is the sweetest little thing but sure gets distracted VERY easily. she is always posed so nicely but her eyes will literally go in every direction except on me.

i had to pick up kira from another day at camp jenny so i stopped home first, grabbed my Tracy Joy camera bag full of gear (speaking of which, if you don’t have one yet…get one! my dearest Tracy is closing up shop to concentrate on other things and is having a blowout sale on her awesome bags!)

lucky for me! look what happened!

that didn’t last too long….there go the eyes!

must have been a microscopic bug of some sort flying by or a dog barking 3 miles away. that’s really all it takes for her to loose it.  did i mention she is fast as lighting too. a real joy to photograph.

oh no, someone is jealous?

scram kid! this is a once in a lifetime shot here! i’m losing her as it is without you jumping around like a crazy person! and if i asked you to take a picture you’d be running for the hills like i was asking you to eat something (did i mention kira is a NON-eater, she survives on air and love).

oh wait…she’s back!

believe it or not, i got about 10 more shots that were just as sweet. thank you al for letting gigi check something of the long to-do list. who cares that she is wearing  her infamous night gown attire, we finally got a good shot!

and then we blew bubbles….in her nightgown.

jenny was not happy, back in the tub!

lesson learned…never leave the house without a camera…you never know who might cooperate when you least expect it!

although pretty and graceful, apparently dance is indeed a contact sport. my kira ADORES dance. she was selected and has chosen to join the pre-competition 4-6 yr. old team next year. that means double the dance schedule and three times the dance moves. she is so super excited and can’t get enough. we are prepping for the big september start with a few weeks of dance camp, which kira would opt to go to every day, all day and sleep there, if they would let her.

yesterday i got a call long after camp had ended from my dear sister, who so kindly takes such good care of kiry while i slave away in an office all day, taking her on play dates and swimming for endless hours in the pool. (note to self-coming back as a teacher in my next life) p.s.-kira told me yesterday that she was going to live with aunt jenny and i could visit her on fridays.

kira didn’t want to tell me about the “incident” did she think i wasn’t going to notice.

let me zoom in.

gross. big fat bloddy lip. lucky for you all i didn’t take a shot of the inside in all its oozing glory.

from what i gathered from the story as told by beaten and bruised 4 year old, someone was tumbling and poor kira took a foot to the face. as a truly sympathetic mom, my first response of course was, “that’s what you get for not giving people their space”; kira has a tendancy to ALWAYS be right under your feet, if she is not actually standing right your feet (i have had many ruined pedicure’s to prove it!). she likes to feel safe and close, really close.

best part of the story was kira convincing me that she was fine and it didn’t hurt, she swore to it (she is the biggest wimp in real life. a stubbed toe is usually an all day band aid, icing event, which made her justifications even sweeter). she was so terrified that i was not going to let her go back. little does she know i come from a long line of “walk it off, your crazy if you think i am taking you to a doctor” group of ladies.

oh lord….is that my mother i am turning into?

With all the great things going on around here, we made some other BIG changes, not blogsite related. My little love, Kira as she is known, took a huge step. She, like her mother, is extremely habitual and does not take to change very well. You will completely understand how bad she is about it if you have ever tried to feed her a chicken nugget that is not Perdue pre-cooked, fresh not frozen, in the BLUE package!

Thanks to my wonderful step-mom and Franny as she is called by the girls, Kira has officially gone from this

to this

I just LOVE it! It is taking us all some time to get used to the fact hat K no longer has shaggy hair in her face all the time. She despises pony’s and takes them out as soon as I walk out of the house. Day after day I come home to a head full of all day playing and knots so tight I sometime think I am removing there hair from her head instead of brushing it. Many a nights have I threatened to take a scissor to it myself if her and Daddy did not agree to manage the mane in my absence!

No more threats needed. My one and only issue is, she looks so old! Old in kid years means like 6 or 7, instead of the tiny 4 years old that she is. It’s growing on me (no pun intended) day after day. Every time I see her I love it more and more!

Thank you Franny from rocking the new do and knowing your way around a scissor like no one else!

I don’t usually work well with change. I am a creature of habit and change is not usually my friend. Today, I embrace change! Today I learn to suck it up and learn new things, new things to make my life easier (eventually, once I get the hang of it). Change that will bring only good things, and change that helps make me a better me.

As many of you may have noticed, some time ago my blog took a turn for the worst. Some how I was marked as spam. Me of all people was branded malicious! Not sure how it happened but it did. I swear it wasn’t my fault! I spent endless nights and too many hours to count trying to fix the “mess” that was created by some meany out there screwing around with things (obviously you can tell I am so far from technical). I tried and tried but the help I needed was far beyond my means. I cried, I sobbed I had bad dreams about it. Then it hit me. It was time for a do-over. If I was going to make change, I was going at it at full speed!

I reached out to the wonderful, patient, kind and amazing artist, Genevieve of Lilac Creative (she made our fancy Prop Insanity site). I explained to G that I needed to junk my website (I never had time to update it) and I needed a blog overhaul. She came to my rescue immediately. We started designing the new Ultimate Photog BlogSite.

I finally feel like I have my own “place” on this ginormous online world. A place to showcase my work as well as share my life stories all in one easy to navigate, fun home!

Cruise around. Check out the new galleries (essential for a Photog), My super cool landing page that can take you wherever you want to go and a new colorful logo that just makes me smile! We are still evolving and make some changes.

My favorit part (so far) is my own little blah blah blog, as I call it where I can just shoot the breeze, chat it up and share my life with with whoever is bored enough to read it!

So I will be able to advertise and link you, my loyal readers, to my favorite shops, cool finds and great friends I have made out here on this journey. We are still working out some minor tweaks, tweets and updates and reader subscription will be added soon and I am sure my ever changing thought process will bring on even more cool things to come!

The biggest squeeze goes out to G! I thank you from the kindness of my heart for being so dear and patient and for putting my thoughts and dreams on paper (I mean on screen). You ROCK like no one else!! I can’t thank you nearly as much as I should!

Here’s to change! And to good things to come!