The End is Just the Beginning

In other words, fall is almost over and winter is just starting :)
The other day I happened to look out the window and notice that the light was at the perfect golden hour light. Most of our leaves are gone, so I wanted to capture some pictures with the gorgeous light and some to-die-for bokeh. AND as it just so happens, MaryAnn at Shutter Happy is having a photo challenge with the theme being "Color". So my color is a mixture of golden yellows, orangey reds and dusky browns.

The colors started off as a light undertone of the beautiful golden light to come:

I'm entering this photo in Mary Ann's photo challenge {Shutter Happy} :

By the time I found a tree in our back yard to photograph, the sun and sunk a little lower in the sky...

I'm not exactly sure what I love about this shot - I almost deleted it right after I took it because my camera was being stubborn and not focusing on the whole leaf, but I'm so glad I decided to keep it.

The golden light became more intense...

And the following photo I'm entering in golden hour photo challenge @ The Three Photographers Adventure:

Until it forced me to stop because all I ended up with were jack-o-lantern-looking leaves...

{Our five kittens have just started to open their eyes, here are two of them.}

~Mary Kate

Dear Dad

You're goofy

And sweet.

You know how to make people laugh.

You are an amazing story teller and a great speaker.

You are thoughtful and generous.

I love you and I'm so glad I can call you Daddy. 

Love Your little girl,

Mary Kate

11:11 on 11/11/11

Today is 11/11/11. A momentous day in our family. For the past several months my brothers have been obsessed with the time11:11. Each day when the clock turns from 11:10 to 11:11, then jump up and down and do a little dance. I have no idea why this started or what prompted them to be so infatuated with this time each day.
However, since this has been going on for a while and we all know about, my mom decided a few weeks ago that on 11/11/11 at 11:11, we would have a little party. Unfortunetly we weren't able to have the party at 11:11, however we all joined in on their celebrations.
I did take a short video with my brand-new ipod touch that came yesterday (I love it so much! It's my first ipod and I love that it is so similar to an iphone without the monthly charges) and I thought I'd share it with you. I for one think it demonstrates perfectly how absolutely crazy my family is :)

Enjoy:

(And as a side note: I have no idea why the 4 year old (Benny) is pulling off his shirt at the end of the video)
See I told you...crazy! :)
And then John Paul (the 11 year old) made this proclamation:

 (That's Rosie at the end sticking her face in the camera)


And then, a few minutes ago, my mom called me up to the living room to hear what Benny was saying. I pulled out my ipod and pushed record. What cracks us up is how serious he is! lol:

And since I'm on the topic of my new ipod touch... here are a couple of photos I took with it earlier today and yesterday:

And since I'm sharing photos of our five little kittens, here's one I took with my real camera:

Aren't they the cutest little things ever?!?!?
~Mary Kate

16

I had an amazing Sweet 16 party Saturday. It was wonderful! It was exactly what I had wanted. I don't have time to post all the pictures from my party. However I did participate in this weeks Scavenger Hunt show I wanted to share that with you all.  (I haven't done the Scavenger Hunt in weeks!)




Food

Food from my birthday tea party. My mom made the cake herself, isn't she amazing? All the food was homemade :)

Purple

Rosie in all her snow garb. She sure loves pink and purple!
In Disguise

Not sure if this counts, but oh well :)
Shapes

The garland decorations we had up for my birthday party.

Photographers Choice

One of my favorite pictures! It's from our freak October snow we had last Saturday.

 And I have a couple pictures from my b-day besides the two above.

Each place setting had a name tag for you to wear. I handmade each favor box and made a couple of the name tags and my grandmother made the rest of the name tags.

The tables!

Details.... :) Those are the favor boxes I made in the top right hand photo. :)

Our family room transformed into a magical tea room. I took these the night before.

Guests starting to arrive and have fun!

More decorations. My grandmother made the balls (right). They were really simple, just time consuming.

I received this beautiful necklace from my bff, Anna.

And I'll leave you with some of the last photos I took as a 15 year old:

And I took this photo of my sister Rose last week:

And tomorrow I will hopefully be getting my permit so I can start driving!!! :)
~Mary Kate

Apple Pies

{BTW - This is my last post as a 15 year old. That's right, in an hour I will officially be 16!! Let's hope I can finish this before the hour's up!}
Last week Cecilia and I took a day off of school to bake apple pies at Grandma's house. It's things like that - baking pies in the middle of the day - that make me love homeschooling even more :)

Getting ready to start

Anyway, it's become a yearly tradition to bake apple pies completely from scracth with our Grandma. Sadly we couldn't do it last year because my Grandma was having heart surgery and then had all these complications, so it was really nice to be able to do it again!

 I was a little bit mad at myself, I meant to bring my new wireless shutter release remote so that I could get some pictures of me baking as well, but I forgot. Oh well :) I also didn't take nearly as good of pictures as I could have because I was rushed trying to stay caught up with the rest of them. (We each were making our own pie).

But it was a lot of fun! Our Aunt Jackie (picture above: bottom left) joined us with her daughter, Lauren (picture above: top left). We definitely got messy with all the flour we were using!

Okay, so I didn't get the world's bet pictures, and yes I totally messed up my white balance half-way through because I didn't trust my instincts and I changed it (don't ask me why) and no, I didn't get any pictures of myself...but I think still managed to capture the essence of what happened at Grandma's house. We made more memories and laughed and made a mess. We get sticky from the juicy apples, sneaked bites of apple filling, almost tripped over the cat, got a flour bath and then perfected the art of apple pie juggling while riding home. {Maybe I should explain the last part, my grandma only has one oven, so we baked our pies at our own houses. The drive home was a bit of an adventure, every turn and slight incline or decline in the road, would cause some of the juicy filling to leak out. So we had to turn the pies at just the right angle at just the right times to avoid loosing half our filling!}

David, my other Aunt's 1 year old :)

And so ended our adventure with the apple pies.
~Mary Kate

{Phew! I finished this with 3 minutes to spare!}

Little Giveaways..

Who doesn't love great giveaways? I definitely do:) So head on over to Umbrella Girl and check out her wonderful giveaway. She has (I think) 21 prizes. 








And then head over to Allie Photography and enter her giveaway to win a really cute headband!

And a post wouldn't be complete without a picture:

 Yet another picture from my session last week.
~Mary Kate

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