Sweet girl

Lily walked into the office while I was switching lenses on my camera to get ready for the boys' basketball games tomorrow and said, "Oh, piturz? Otay!". Then she went running into the kitchen and hopped up on the table. She knows the drill. However, she usually fights me and I end up having to bribe and beg her to cooperate for a couple minutes. But not this time. It was so exciting for me! She gave me a good 3-4 minutes and tried her very best to look happy.













Once she was bored with just taking pictures, she ran over and grabbed her blocks to start making "towers". It's her 2nd favorite thing in the world to do right now. Her #1 favorite at the moment is watching 'Toy Story'.










She quickly got sick of me continuing to snap away and looked at me with this face and said, "Stop taking piturz now and make a tower!" Bossy little girl.

Our littlest one

I had my 20 week ultrasound today and am happy to report that the baby looked great. We also got confirmation that she is indeed still a girl, which made me very happy but made Ross just a little bit sad. I think he was holding on to the tiniest shred of hope that she might just turn out to be a boy after all.






Now, on to what we're going to name her. I hesitate a bit to share our favorite names with everyone before we decide on one and actually name her. It seems like whenever we've discussed the names that we liked for our kids in the past, people liked to tell us all the ones they DIDN'T like and why. Or flat out said, "Eww, I don't like that." And I get it. There have been plenty or times that I've heard the name someone chose for their child and think, "Really? out of all the names in the world to choose from and you picked THAT one, really?" But I wouldn't actually say that to someone. Especially if they'd already named their child that. I think that people feel more free to voice their dislikes if you haven't chosen THE name yet. That's why I'm a little afraid to tell everyone what we've narrowed it down to. But I'm gonna do it anyways. Here goes:

Adelyn, Saylor, Presley, Piper, Jessa, Stella, Gwen, Hallie & Olivia (Liv)

Now there are tons of other names we really like but aren't considering them because they're either too popular at the moment, someone in one of our families has already taken it, or they don't sound good with Farris. We are still open to suggestions too. I think I'll start a name poll on the sidebar of the blog soon, so make sure you vote on your fav. I'm not promising we'll use the winner, but we will consider the results!

Little sleeping beauty

Lily hardly ever falls asleep outside of her crib. Which is great because she sleeps wonderfully as long as we're home and she has her crib to sleep in. However, I never really get to see her when she's sleeping and I love how little ones look when they sleep. Anyways, we got home late last night and I went into the boys' room to read with Bo. When I came out to the family room, I found Lily sweetly snoozing on the floor. She looked so beautiful that I couldn't resist grabbing my camera to snap a picture of her. Oh, how I love that little girl!

An update

Well, I haven't felt like picking up my camera lately...or blogging either which is pretty obvious. I've been trying to catch up on house work and all the other things that have been neglected since October when this little one in my belly started making me sick. Now that the holidays are over, I'm slowly getting my long list of must do's done. Hopefully I'll feel more creative soon and actually get the urge to photograph my children again.

I did force myself to bring the camera with me yesterday though. The kids didn't have school yesterday and were itching to get of the house. So I took them to Cabela's to look at all the animals and check out the fish. The assortment of fudge they've got in their 'General store' was the biggest incentive for me, I must admit. I brought my camera because I knew that Lily would either love all the animals or be scared to death. Either way, I wanted to capture her reaction. Next time I'm bring the video camera though. Her excitement over EVERY single animal she saw couldn't be captured with still images.

We spent lots of time in the little aquarium they've got. Lily was amazed by every single fish.



This one freaked Lily out a little bit. It stayed really close to the glass and kept opening and closing it's mouth. It was right about at eye level to her.









She tried more than once to squeeze through the bars to go pet one of the nicer looking animals.







I tried getting Bo is some shots, but he was off looking for what he wanted for his birthday. His list is around 15 items long at this point.

Published!

Someone from Hero Arts contacted me a couple of months ago about using some of my pictures in their 2009 catalog. So how could I say no to seeing my work published? She recently sent me a couple copies of the finished product and I think the layouts turned out so cute. You can view their online catalog by clicking here. My pictures are on pages 51, 70 & 89. If you're into scrapbooking or card making, you'll love their stuff so check it out!

Lily's 2 year shoot

I took these pictures of Lily on the day before she turned two. I went to Audrey's studio because it was way too cold to shoot outside and I wanted to play around with her studio lights again anyways. I was a little nervous that Lily wouldn't be cooperative, I mean she IS two now. That is usually such a hard age for me to photograph. I had NO idea how terribly the shoot would go though. She wanted nothing to do with the studio. Period. She was okay for the 1st couple minutes we were there so I at least got a couple decent shots of her. But I was so bummed because she looked so cute in her outfit with her hair all done up. I even brought her Christmas dress just in case she was being really good and would allow me an outfit change. No such luck. After the initial 5 minutes, all she did was roll around on the floor and ruin her hair, cry, yell at me and run for the door. Naughty. So here's what I got:
















At this point, Audrey was trying to make Lily laugh or least stop crying by putting a puppet on her hand and "getting" me with it. I don't know if Lily thought she was hurting me or was just annoyed by everything, but she was trying to yell, "DON'T DO DAT" over and over again, through her tears. Audrey stopped as soon as she could see Lily wasn't finding it amusing. But Lily was really mad at this point and just kept yelling. I think she may a temper. Hmmm...I wonder where she gets that from? ;)










Once we got home and she'd had a little time to cool off in the car, I got the camera out again. She was much more agreeable at home.




Then I told her Santa was outside and she was very intent on spotting a glimpse of him.

















As you can see, she wasn't TOO traumatized by what I'd put her through earlier in the day. May 2009 bring a more cooperative Lily.

I had another ultrasound and found out it's a.........

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YAY!!!!!!! Now we just need to think of a name for her. All suggestions welcome. If you've got a good one to share please leave it to me in a comment. We're really struggling with finding something good so we could use all the help we can get.

Our family

We had our annual family photoshoot this last October. It always seems like such an ordeal to get everyone in coordinating clothing and keep everyone happy and smiling until I feel like we've got some decent enough shots. This year was no exception. Lily did okay considering her age, but it was still a somewhat stressful event. Thank you Audrey for having so much patience with us. You did a wonderful job!