Sleigh Bells Ring...Snow is Glistening

Can you guess what trick nature played on us today? That's right, it SNOWED! In October! Maybe that's not a big deal to all you Northern folk, but here in Southern PA it doesn't snow until December, occasionally in Nov. But NEVER in October. In fact the last time in snowed here in October was 39 years ago.

And we didn't just get light flurries on and off all day, no we got steady heavy snow for 10-12 straight hours. And it dumped on us about 8 inches of snow. 

The worst part of this storm is the fact that all the poor trees still have the majority of their leaves on, and with 8 inches of snow + their leaves tons of big branches of fallen of trees everywhere.

See that big branch? This was taken around 11 AM, but 2PM most of that tree had fallen off, their are now huge branches around the entire tree. It's very sad.

 A lot of power lines were knocked down by branches and over 53,000 people in my area have had no power all day. Thankfully our power has only gone of twice and both times it came back on within 5 minutes. 

I had a bunch of fun in the morning/early afternoon outside taking pictures. My mom and I took a walk down our road to get some cool pictures. She held an umbrella over my camera which was in a plastic bag (with a hole for the front of the lens to poke through) so that my camera was safe from the falling snow. 

This next picture might just be one of my new all time favorites:

In fact, I like it so much, that I decided to add the first few lyrics to "Winter Wonderland":

And look, we still have flowers blooming a fall colored leaves:

And there you have it. 

Our bizarre weather.

Although, considering the weird (weather wise) year we've had, maybe this shouldn't be too surprising. Starting with snow in April, (yeah, see snow in April never happens either, except this past April 1st we woke up to a blanket of snow). And then having an earthquake, hurricane, tropical storm flooding and record-breaking amounts of rain in August, September and now October. I guess it was appropriate to add an October mini-blizzard. :)

~Mary Kate

A Few Beauties

I had the honor of photographing the couple that leads the worship at my youth group. They got married last year and I took their engagement photos in Sept. 2010. However, this year, armed with a better camera and more experience, I asked them if they wanted some more photos and they happily agreed. You can't tell yet, but they're expecting a baby in late May!

I will post more photos from the shoot later, right now I wanted to link up some pictures.











This week's theme is "Jewelry". I love this shot of their rings:

This theme is "Natural Beauty"

Aren't they cute?

Next:

And the last ones:

This weeks theme is "cute": 

Thanks for stopping bye!

~Mary Kate

P.S.
I've decided that I'll start allowing comments again on my 16th birthday next Wednesday. :)

Life...

...is busy. I've been trying to do a bunch of things and I keep running out of time.

Time...is precious. I need to keep reminding myself of that when I start to do the less important things.

Things...are annoying. There are always things - things to do, things to see, things to eat, things to visit, things to make, things to enjoy, things to glue in my brain.

 My brain...is practially fried. From school to babysitting job to chores to more school, my days are busy, filled with things and less and less time...and yet...

this is my life...

my life is good...

and I'm so thankful for this life.

~Mary Kate

Rotating Header

Hey guys! I just made my first rotating header for our family blog (which I've been running for three years now, you can find it here:  Life in the Ant Hill). I thought I'd share the 9 sets of images I used to create the rotating header. They are all from the past few weeks and roughly 50-60% of the images are SOOC.
Here they are in the order I put them in:

I'm so happy that it turned out the way I wanted it too!

Good night!!!

~Mary Kate

Autumn Colors

Around here the leaves are starting to turn into gorgous shades of yellow, orange and red. I've had a lot of fun out in our yard taking pictures.

I'm entering the next photo into the Live Every Moment photo challenge:

The theme is Autumn and this is by far my favorite picture that captures "Autumn".

This next photo I'm entering in the Shades of Autumn Challenge:

This week's color is "green". I love the fact that it's mostly green, but you can see the beginning of gorgeous colors peaking through.

Fall also means school which means waking up early enough to see the sunrise. Most mornings I don't even notice the sunrise in my rush to get ready for school, however yesterday morning I happened to glance outside and see a spectacular sunrise. Of course I had to run and get my camera and run outside and find someway to make it interesting.

Those were the true colors, I promise, the only editing I did was add my watermark and sharpen the leaves. That's it.God is the true artist of this beauty, I just captured his amazing work.

This next photo makes me so happy. I've wanted to capture a scene like this for a while and I finally did!
And since it makes me so happy I found a photo challenge for it!

On our 45 min. drive to school Monday morning, my mom rolled down the window and came to an almost complete stop so I could get this picture. :)

I love fall colors!

I still have a bunch of photos waiting for me to edit them or post them. In fact I still have never gotten around to posting the photos (or even finish editing the photos) from my little impromptu photoshoot with my younger siblings last week.

But I figured that if I try to wait until all my photos were edited and ready to share, then I would not be posting for a very long time. Because the problem is, I keep taking new photos each day and then every few days I sit down and edit a couple here and there. So I'm always behind.

Ah well, at least I have these. I'll leave you with a bunch from the last two weeks:

Trying to be creative by sticking my camera in the cabinet to get this shot.

How my bedroom looks most of the time. And how I want it to look the rest of the time.

Very random picture taken while listening to my Spanish CD for homework.

Rose is a goofball. 'Nuf said.

The starfish in our bathroom.

One of the pictures during our "impromptu" photo shoot last week. See how messy his shirt is? yeah I didn't bother to change his clothes, that's how spontaneous it was. :)

Our globe.

During our photo shoot I pretty much just followed Joey around and snapped pictures of him playing.

I more formally "posed" the older kids. John Paul, as stated by one of my friends "has beautiful eyes". I agree!

Our family "bus" aka 12 passenger van.

I hope you are all having a great Autumn!

~Mary Kate