Best in Show

Back in April, 2012, I wrote a blog post entitled The Boys of Summer, describing how Courtney managed to get this great picture of Trent:

Out of all the nice shots she got that day, this was my hands-down favorite. I just think it’s a great picture! In 2012, the girls did not participate in 4H, so we weren’t able to use this picture in the fair. This past year, Courtney signed up for 4H photography, but you can only submit pictures that have been taken in the past year, and we just missed the mark. A few weeks after the fair, we received an email from the 4H organizers letting all the 4H-ers know they were invited to submit photos to a local festival our town has every fall. This festival has a live band, antique car show, and an art and photography contest. We checked out the entry form, and their rules did not include any timeframes for when the pictures had to have been taken. So we decided to enter this picture.

Courtney got a call yesterday morning from one of the judges saying her picture had won “Best of Show” in her category! I was at the grocery when she got the call, so she called me to let me know. She told me later that when she was dialing the phone to tell me, she was so excited she dropped the phone!  :-D

We’re proud of Courtney and thankful she was recognized for such beautiful artwork!

Good morning, sunshine!

This was a phrase Mom used to wake us up with on many a morning and I find myself using it often. Claire is looking especially sunshiny this morning. I was able to capture her first smile of the day, just moments after she woke up.

Young at heart

My mother-in-law turned 84 a couple of weeks ago. She is something else. She has diabetes, which really affects her vision and her hearing has been bad for as long as I’ve known her (when we met she was close to 60). But other than, she is a very, very youthful 84. She has a very sharp mind and gets around very well.

She has always been very good about sending each one of us a birthday card without fail. Her habit is to include a handwritten note with the card, sometimes writing on the inside of the card, sometimes including a separate letter in the envelope. A couple of weeks ago, she sent me a nice card and letter for my birthday. After filling me in on the family news, she updated me on her health. This is part of what she wrote:

I just re-read the letter and I went off the edge but still can see better – I think I can read the bulletin at church first time in 2 years and also do not need a magnifying glass to read books. I guess I just wanted to feel like “60” forever!! Ha!

I don’t know how many people think of 60 as being a time of youthful energy and health, but it just goes to show that age really is a relative thing.

I think she looks pretty amazing for 84.  :-)

Little boys

Several years ago, after Grant was born, Mom and Dad got Mick a book called “What Little Boys Are Made Of” for a Christmas gift. It’s filled with little poems, scripture and words of wisdom about little boys.  The cover looks like this:

The book is filled with pictures that are similar in style to this cover. For years now, I’ve wanted to try to take some pictures of Grant that were modeled after the book, but just haven’t taken the time to do it. With the start of a new school year, I’ve been more aware of how much the kids are growing, especially Grant, since he is now 5 and will start kindergarten. So, I took advantage of a free evening with nice lighting and shot some pictures.

Typically, I prefer close-up shots because I love to see facial expressions, but I liked this one a little further back so the old barn door would be included.

He was a very cooperative model, especially considering the fact I had changed him out of his swim trunks into this outfit right before he was heading out to swim with the girls.

This next one has a fun Picasa filter applied to it called “Cinemascope;” I think he looks like a silent film star here.  At this point, he was looking for bugs, lost in his own little world.

Now, look closely at his expression in this next picture and imagine a light bulb over his head. This is the moment an idea came into his 5-year-old, little-boy mind.

I think it was just before this moment that he became aware of the sound of the shutter clicking and remembered I was there taking his picture. He looked up at me and smiled this smile and I snapped it real quick, thinking what a nice smile it was. Immediately after I took the picture, he broke into this completely silly expression and froze.

Right away, I realized he was posing for me. So, I took another one as fast as I could … and he did it again … and again, giving me every silly face he could conjure up.

 

I wish we had video of this because I think even the pictures don’t completely capture the hilarity of these moments. In spite of each huge grin or outlandish expression on his face, he was completely silent and frozen between each picture, waiting until he heard me take the picture, and then he’d make the next face and freeze again.

 

Inwardly, I was absolutely dying with laughter, but I held it together long enough to keep taking the pictures until he was all faced out.  :-D

 

I loved these so much, I had to crop each picture to be able to see his expression more close-up. Just imagine a completely silent, frozen boy making these faces and you pretty much have it.

    

   

   

I’ve looked at these pictures many times and they still make me smile each time. :-)  After all these crazy- face pictures, it might seem like an abrupt change to end with such a serious expression, but I love this last one. It’s my favorite of the group. Or maybe the Cinemascope one. Or the smiley one. Maybe I should just look through them all again. ;-)

The John Deere people might be interested in this

Our pastor likes to play a little color game with Trent. He’ll say, “What color is a John Deere tractor?” and “What color is a Kubota tractor?”, etc. etc. This morning, Trent was trying to tell me what cereal he wanted for breakfast. The boxes were too high for him to reach, so I said “What color is the box?” He thought about it for a moment, then slowly said “John Deere green.” He’s learning, Pastor Mark!  :-D  This gets me thinking though, there a lot of things you can get these days with the John Deere logo. Don’t think I’ve seen cereal … yet.

 

“Bleak House” by Charles Dickens

 

Yep, this is how I sit when I read books, too.

Pictures, Video, Memories

A big job for special occasions these days involves gathering up lots of photos from the past. While preparing for their anniversary party, I think I had eight of Mom and Dad’s photo albums and numerous framed pictures and letters scattered around the kitchen. It was hard not to just scan them all, but I was trying to focus on the important, clear pictures that would help tell “their story.” Some of the photo albums were in pretty good shape, others were a little more worn; most of the pictures still looked good, if not a little yellowed, but I wonder how much longer they will last?

One of the things I found – a newspaper -- was getting dangerously close to tatters. The following family story, which the article describes, is why Mom has kept this newspaper for so long. On March 31, 1966, eight days before Chuck was born, Dad was involved in a terrible car accident that almost killed him. He was thrown through the windshield of the truck he was driving and landed in a field. He crawled to a nearby farmhouse for help. He was in such bad shape that the coroner was asked to prepare his death certificate. The story was picked up by a local newspaper and printed on the front page. I found that newspaper at Mom and Dad’s, which Mom has kept for the past 47 years. It was very yellowed and some of the paper was tearing at the crease at the end of the article, but it’s still very readable and I was thankful to get it scanned.

As a bonus, scanning in these pictures often revealed details about them that I’d never noticed – even in pictures I was very familiar with. When pictures are scanned, it allows you to zoom in on them, which sometimes reveals details that were otherwise too small to see.

For example, when I was working on the invitations, I ended up enlisting the help of a friend who does desktop publishing. When I gave it to him, it had this picture of Mom and Dad on the cover:

Mom has always laughed at this picture because she thinks they look so serious and, well, scared.  :-)

My friend suggested getting a higher resolution scan of it (which I did at FedEx Kinko’s for $0.89) so we could crop out the lower half of the picture, allowing us to enlarge it so we could see their faces more clearly.

When we first saw it on his computer monitor, I think I gasped out lout. Seeing the picture so up close changed my impression of it completely. Mom looks confident (even if she was scared to death!), almost regal. Dad looks proud and comfortable with her on his arm.

The process of gathering and scanning all these things to preserve them takes a lot of time, but it is so important. I realized during this process that we are in a unique position at this point in history. If we’re lucky, most of us have quite a bit of paper documents (letters, written genealogies, journals, etc.) and print photos that chronicle our family histories. We also have the technology to preserve these important things before they fade or are destroyed. I truly believe the longer it’s put off, and the more distant we are to the people in these pictures and documents, the less likely it is that they will ever be digitally preserved.

I was thankful to get many things scanned, but there is still so much more to do. A lot of our Worley photos are print; I don’t think we got our first digital camera until 2006. That means I have a lot of work to do before the graduations start rolling by in a couple of years!