Thanksgiving 2016 - Nov 25

This year Thanksgiving fell on a Thursday again. That's weird how that always happens. LOL j/k

The holidays are always a fun mixture of trying to find the time to see everybody and/or sometimes trading off years to do certain things with your extended family. This year was the year we had two invitations for dinner that were happening literally at the exact same time. We ended up making an appearance at both places but having dinner at my parents house with my brother and his family. Chaos ensued and turkey was consumed, in that order. =) I brought my camera with the intention of snapping a series of pictures but honestly, the kids were very energy consuming and to top it off I literally did not bring a memory card for my camera. I have been shooting a lot of family sessions and I actually shot one earlier in the day and took the card out of my camera and never put another one back in. A borrowed memory card meant a few shots were to be had but that would be the extent of it.

Now we start the downhill slide into December/Xmas/New Years/Chloe's B-day and I don't know if I should laugh of cry. Probably both.
I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving whatever you did, and please don't go shopping today if you know what's good for you.
Have a great weekend, folks~

-B

The Wish Bone! - Nov 18

It has been quite a busy week for me having photographed 8 different families from last Thursday to Monday, I have been stuck to my computer seemingly all day, every day. Thursday morning(this week) I woke up to Heather telling me the power was out and of course it had to be the coldest morning so far this year. I got Chloe up and going and before I knew it we had the gas fireplace on and we were all in the front room running out the clock before school and trying not to freeze. LOL.

It turns out there was some kind of weird widespread power outage across San Ramon, Danville, and parts of Alamo and more than 30 thousand people were without power including almost all of the surrounding school. Then messages started coming in that school was still going to operate and power was planned to be back on by 1145am. Our power at our house came on just in time for me to be able to use the garage door opener but apparently Chloe's school was without power until 11am or so. Pretty weird.

Absolutely and completely unrelated, recently Chloe started asking me(us) about how would she go about getting a "wish bone". It seemed that with Thanksgiving approaching, they must have been discussing this in school and she was highly intrigued. I promised her I would get her one the next time we had one just in case it never came about on Thanksgiving. Sure enough, I went to Costco this week and picked up a rotisserie chicken and true to my word, I pulled out the wish bone and told Chloe we would pull it the following day. It's so silly but she was quite excited to do it, so we made our wishes and away it went. I won't say who won but let's just say, I did not win. =)

Have a great weekend, folks~

B

Still Waiting For Fall! - Nov 11

I checked back on the blog from a year ago and apparently once again I am one week off from taking the exact same photos in the exact same place. I needed a location to shoot some quick family photos for someone and I wanted to verify my "secret" location just at the end of my street would fit the bill so I took Chloe down for some "test shots". It worked out great and I'm sure I will be back in the coming weeks to use my beautiful secret location as the trees continue to change color...there certainly is more color to come!

Have a great weekend, folks~

B

MEOW-LOWEEN! - Nov 4

Hey would you look at that, it's NOVEMBER. The year is almost over, Christmas is almost here..which means Chloe's birthday is almost here..which means once again it will all be here before we know it.

This year, Halloween happened to fall on a Monday, which if you remember being a kid having Halloween on a weeknight is a total bummer. You want to hang out with your friends and not have to go home at a reasonable hour and go to bed. Each year, Chloe has more and more stamina when trick-or-treating and would probably go as long we let her. This year, Chloe decided to be a "black cat" which sort of happened by accident. Heather came home one day with a cheap "cat" mask from somewhere (can't remember) that she figured she would wear when we went trick-or-treating and when Chloe saw it, she basically commandeered it and proclaimed she was now going to be a black cat for Halloween. It was an unusual choice in my eyes based on her previous years of costume choices and all the cool things that were available but Chloe is the most decisive person(kid or otherwise) I have ever seen. She makes her choice, immediately, and that is all there is to it.

Halloween came and went, and now Candy is no longer in short supply in our household. Chloe was very excited to dump out her bin and admire her haul and in fact she has done so at least twice every day for seemingly no reason. That's what kids do, I guess. =)

Here are some photos of the general Halloween based shenanigans that have been going on around here..have a great weekend, folks~

-B

Aloha! Mahalo! - Oct 28

Aloha!

Well, we made it. We survived our longest family trip both in miles traveled and consecutive days spent away from home. We left bright and early on a Saturday morning(our actual anniversary, Oct 15) walked through security, loaded on to the plane and flew about 5.5 hours with no issues. Landed in Oahu, grabbed our luggage which for some reason is like a miles walk away, jumped on a shuttle and picked up our rental car. Rental car should be a term used to describe any car of which is potentially the worst car available. It was some sort of 4 door Scion thing which I have to admit after a week of driving it, I was was definitely ready to give it back at the end. It's best attribute was the it had air conditioning that was so cold you couldn't keep higher than fan speed 2.

Off to our Hotel which was not your typical hotel room. We intentionally stayed at what they might call a "mini-suite" mostly because it had a full kitchen in the room. This worked out perfect for us because we hit a Safeway and bought a weeks worth of stuff to make breakfast every day and lunches to take with us with the only remaining difficulty being dinners. The time change smacked us in the face on both ends but the best part about it while we were there was going to bed "early" and still waking up and being out and about relatively early the next morning. It definitely screwed us on the way home, though. Our flight home was delayed basically 3 hours so that combined with us losing 3 hours we didn't get home until what the clock said was 130am. Thank you Scott & Glenda for the late night airport service. =)

Heather did a fantastic job of researching places to go and see on a daily basis. I'll admit I had nothing to do with planning where we went, but I did drive everywhere in our terrible rental car so you know, bonus points. Heather found a bunch of great beaches and Chloe just wanted to be in the ocean literally every chance she could get. We spent a few days on the beach swimming and snorkeling and whatnot. We drove out to Kualoa Ranch where we had lunch and then did a movie tour which is basically a gigantic private ranch property that is used for filming a lot of movies(apparently). They load you up in a giant school bus with no windows and a tour guide drives around this huge place showing you stuff and talking about movies. One day we went to a Sea Life Park which was probably the highlight of the trip for Chloe. At this park, they had some typical water life but the main attraction was the ability to swim, touch, and interact with a dolphin. Heather and Chloe did the water experience, I decided to not and unfortunately it was quite difficult to take photos but I did get a good video of the whole thing. Then of course the sucker you in the end into buying a $20 photo that their photographers took so at least we have that. Then after that, in the same park, they had a really neat bird sanctuary thing where you could enter and check out the birds up close and personal. If you picked up a little feed stick and held it out, the birds would fly over and land on your hand! We had a few incidents of Chloe getting startled but then it was all good. Weird, but really neat.

Over the course of the week I drove around 300 miles and we drove almost every possibly route around the Island. Towards the end of the week we drove quite a long way to go visit the Disney Aulani resort which we originally were considering. It's beautiful and amazing as you might imagine it would be, but we agreed that our version of the trip was more suited to us. Staying there would be amazing if that was your plan, to stay there! Beautiful pools, water slides, private beach cove and I'm sure great food and shows and whatever else..but I am much happier jumping in the car and adventuring out. Fun to see it, though.

The weather was beautiful, essentially the same every day in the mid 80s and not once did it drop below 75(even overnight). We did have a little bit of rain here and there, but nothing that ever effected anything we were doing. Overall, a great trip that was somewhat thrown together in the 11th hour. Heather put in a lot of time, stress and effort trying to have a great trip and hopefully she feels like it all paid off in the end. LOL. I'm bad at vacations and bad at relaxing for the most part so I tend to try to just go with the flow. The only bad part of the trip like I mentioned before was being stuck on the airplane for literally 3.5 hours on the way home. Other than that, smooth sailing.

Obviously over the course of a week I took a ton of photos, so here is a random pull from the week. Have a great weekend, folks~

Mahalo!

-B