Jet photos 2013

I feel like I always say this, but again, I am so far behind on this blog, and editing photos, but I have pretty good reasons.  It just stresses me out because I like to keep it up to date and it’s that constant thought in the back of my mind on my list of things to do.

Earlier in November, I took jet photos for Mark’s squadron.  Families signed up and I took their photos and edited them and gave them all CD’s.  It was fun and I learned a lot doing it, but I also realized I have a lot to learn still before I would even consider doing this professionally.

I rented a Canon 6D with a 17-40L lens and I LOVED using that combo.  The 6D is a pretty big step up from my 60D and I loved using a full frame camera with a wide angle lens.  It was a lot of fun to play around with and someday I hope to own one.  After I win the lottery.  Or sell a bunch of houses.  However, taking pictures in the AZ sun mid-day doesn’t make for great pictures, but we didn’t really have much choice.  You either put up with the sun, or you stick the jet under a canopy and then have blown out backgrounds and parts of the building in your photos.  Kind of a lose-lose situation, but I made due with what we had to deal with.  But I got them taken and back to all the families on CD’s within 2 weeks, so I was pretty happy with myself for that!  Especially considering we had a 4 day trip to Sedona and a relative stay with us for a week in there.

I had helped my friend, Stephanie, take a different squadrons pictures, and she was able to do lots of cool poses, like putting people in the jet, and families up on the wing and kids and dogs (and even a few adults) in the intake of the jet.  I was REALLY hoping we’d be able to do that, but the guy that Mark works with wouldn’t let us do ANY of that, so it was a huge bummer.  Next year, if I do this again, I’ll make sure that I get permission to do those shots.  I asked the guy to get the permission, but he didn’t, so he kind of screwed everyone over in that aspect.  I was pretty annoyed but oh well.  Steph took the pictures of us that I am in, and I took the other ones of Mark and the kids.  Ben was NOT having it at all.  As in, he was screaming almost the entire time we were trying to take pictures.  I was in the middle of taking pictures for other families, so instead of getting frustrated with him, I just said forget it.  Better luck next year hopefully.

And here are a few of my favorites of families that I took!  If you ever have the opportunity to take jet photos, or any photos really, the end of the day, just after the sun sets gives AMAZING photography opportunities!

Such a cool jet!  I’m so proud that my husband flies these things.  I have to admit, I think he’s pretty awesome.  =)

Ben at 23 months

One more month until the big 02!!  This little guy is changing almost daily now.  He’s hard to keep up with at times!

Ben is in to everything and anything now.  If he can reach it or somehow get to it, he will get into it.  This month I was going to the bathroom and he, of course, as in there with me and got underneath the sink and got into a bathroom cleaner and sprayed himself with it.  Thank God it wasn’t in his face, but it left a nice bleached spot on his shirt.  (See picture of him running outside below.)  So I locked it so he couldn’t push the trigger any more and the next thing I know he’s sucking on the end of it.  Ugh.  That bathroom has a lock on it so he can’t get into it, by the way.  The next day was my first call to Poison Control, since he found grill cleaner underneath a cabinet on our grill (I didn’t even know it was there), and sprayed it all over himself and ate some of it also.  If I get gray hairs, it’s going to be from this boy, for sure.  Luckily they said it wasn’t any big deal and that if he wasn’t throwing up or coughing, he was fine.  He also tripped over Ollie and went head first into the front of the toilet and got a HUGE goose egg on his head.  Of course it happened right before bed, so we were nervous to put him to bed incase he had a concussion or something.  Again, he was fine, except for a huge black and blue lump on his forehead for a few days.

He’s able to put 3-4 words together now, and repeats pretty much anything you say, at least the last word anyway.  “Ben, do you want milk or juice?”  “Juice?”  “Ok, you want juice?  Or do you want milk?”  “Milk?”  “Yeah, juice or milk.  What do you want to drink?”  “Drink?”  You get the idea.  He’s to the point where he knows exactly what he wants, and he’s starting to be able to tell us, although sometimes it takes us a while to decipher exactly what he’s saying.  If you don’t understand him right away, he gets frustrated and then screams.  Great fun.  I love the 20 month to 3.5 year ages…  They are great.

He is CONSTANTLY watching Abbie to see what she’s doing and then trying to copy her.  If Abbie does something, you can guarantee Ben will be doing it along with her shortly.  If Abbie plays with something or wears something or does something, Ben is her little side kick.  They are actually starting to play together now, but he’s also starting to throw his weight around a little bit, which is kind of funny to see.  There have been a few times where he hasn’t liked whatever Abbie did and he grabs on to her shirt and yanks and pulls and yells and won’t let go.  One time he was doing it because he was frustrated about something, and between him grabbing her shirt and trying to pull it and not being able to pry his strong little fingers off of it, and the look on Abbie’s face when he was doing it, I just started to laugh.  Abbie laughed with me but Ben didn’t find it quite as amusing.  Abbie is getting a lot better with him for the most part and I can see them being good friends in the future.  He really looks up to her right now and hopefully it’ll stay that way.  She’s a good person to look up to.

Ben is usually happiest when he’s eating.  Although the other day, Sarah and I went to Chick-Fil-A for lunch with him and he saw the play area and threw a HUGE fit because he wanted to play and not sit and eat.  It took BOTH of us a good 3 minutes to get him in that stupid high chair.  He’s a strong little turd when he wants to be and I still haven’t figured out how he can arch his back, kick his feet and go limp as a noodle so you can’t hold him all at once, and scream at the top of his lungs on top of it.  Ugh.  Abbie didn’t do that very often at all, but this little guy does.  He can be so sweet and charming, but he can also be a little hellion and he varies between the two extremes constantly all day.  We were hiking in Sedona this past weekend and he wanted to walk in the worst way and was not happy that we were carrying him.

He’s all boy and loves to rough house and be chased.  And he is constantly dirty.  Constantly.  I could wipe his face 300 times a day and it’s still dirty most of the time.  He loves to play in the dirt and he typically has a snotty nose, and it’s just not a good combination.  He loves pushing toys around outside and riding the tricycle and his favorite is throwing rocks into the pool.  Yay.  He still loves his paci and lovey and I don’t see him giving those up any time soon, although I only let him have them when he’s in his bed or on long car rides (for my sanity).  He’s been getting up before 8am every day, usually around 7:15am or so, and I miss the days when Abbie would sleep until 10am.  But now he wakes her up and then she comes in and wakes us up, so I guess those days are long gone now, until they’re teenagers anyway.  Then the roles will be reversed I’m sure.

Overall, Ben is a pretty easy going kiddo and we’re so in love with him.  He’s the perfect addition to our family and we couldn’t imagine our lives without him.

Vertuccio Farms

The 2nd week in October we took a trip to Vertuccio farms, which is about an hour from our house.  We met a friend of mine that I’ve known since elementary school and her family there.  She has a kiddo that’s just a little older than Abbie and one that’s just a little older than Ben, so it worked out great!

They had lots of fun little things for the kids to do.  It was a pretty hot day though - in the 90’s still (in early OCTOBER…  living in Phoenix is great…).  Once Abbie and Ellie got together, it was friendship at first sight.  Ellie sent Abbie a cute drawing before they arrived and Abbie asked NON-STOP about when Ellie was going to visit and where she was from.  It was cute.

Ben wasn’t a big fan of the big bouncy pillow until Mark joined him on it.  And then he loved it!  I think Mark did too.

Next was the big slides.  Abbie was afraid to go down them, but after some coaxing, she did.  Mark took Ben down once and he LOVED it and then went down both of them by himself more than once.  He’s a brave little boy!

Abbie and Ellie had lots of fun and it was so fun to watch them interact.  They’re pretty much two peas in a pod.  Four and five year old girls are so cute and these two are very much alike!

We took a short ride around the property in these things.  It was fun too and I think the kids enjoyed it.

Ben really wanted to take a ride on these things so Mark took him around the loop a few times.

We picked out some pumpkins before we headed home to beat the traffic and make dinner.

Liz and her family brought us gifts (so sweet!!) and their gift to Abbie was her own make-up kit, so I’m sure you can imagine the fun that Ellie and Abbie had playing with it.  And if you can’t imagine it, here are some pictures to help!

Ben and Zoe even played with his gift a little bit too!

I wish that Liz and her family lived closer.  And I wish the visit could have been longer, but we had fun with them during their short stay with us.  Hopefully we can go visit them in TN some and get the kiddos together again!

A visit to Butterfield Dairy

Over the summer, we were at Lowe’s looking for paint and we ran into Tommy, Katie and their dog Tucker.  Actually, Abbie ran in to Tucker and wanted to pet him, and that’s how the conversation was started.  We ended up talking with them for a while in Lowe’s and they said that Tommy’s family owned a big dairy farm a little west of town and invited us to come out and take a tour.  Fast forward a few months, we finally found time to go take a tour, and it did not disappoint!

Butterfield Dairy is a HUGE dairy farm west of Phoenix.  Growing up in the mid-west, I’ve been around farms and cows before, but NOTHING like this.  This place was really, really big, and fascinating to learn about!

My favorite was the calf barn.  There were LOTS of calves – I think they said at least a couple hundred.  It was funny how some of them were so shy and skitterish, and some were so curious and friendly.  They all had their ID # tags and then another tag with their birthdays on them.  So the calf below was about 2 weeks old.  I think calves are ADORABLE.  Their stick out ears and big eyes get me every time.

Ben and Tucker decided to go off on their own little adventure.  That boy is fearless and just wanders off by himself all the time!  Abbie never did that!  She usually stuck pretty close to us!

When we met Tommy and Katie at Lowe’s, Katie was pregnant, but now Brynn is a few months old!  Such a cutie!

We got to drive through a few of the barns, which I thought was pretty darn cool.  These cows are well taken care of.  There are fans all over the place and they are pretty clean also, considering they’re full of cows.

I had no clue that cows needed their hooves trimmed also.  I mean, I knew horses did since I’ve paid for that many times in my horse owning days, but it never occurred to me that cows would also need trims, or how they’d do it.  Well here you go.  This is how they do it!  Pretty crazy huh?

This is the cow holding area – where they go before they all line up to go on the milker.  These things spray them off underneath to clean them up a little bit and then they all file on to get milked.

The cows were just as curious about us as we were about them.  I love how interested they are in humans.  Abbie LOVED the farm.

We put Ben to work closing gates and stuff and Abbie got to stand in the huge condenser thing.  (??I can’t remember what it was, but it was REALLY windy in there.)

Next we got to see the cows on the rotary milker.  They can milk 80 (EIGHTY!!!) cows every 6 minutes and they do it 24 hours a day.  They shut the thing down to clean it every 8 hours for 1 hour, but other than that, this thing goes all the time.  I’d never seen a rotary milker, but they walk on to this thing, and a scanner scans their ear tag and the stall they’re in for milking and that’s how they track how much the cow produces.

We got to go underneath the milker and see the cows from the inside and they’re just hanging out enjoying the ride pretty much.  It was kind of funny!  Ben found a huge beetle to check out and he thought that was pretty great.  Tucker was always close by too.

Our little loner boy, wandering off, as usual.

Next we got to go to the maternity barn where all the pregnant cows were and we got to see some minutes old calves!  (No, this isn’t some weird 1 head/2 body calf.  One of them is laying on top of the other one.  He got off the other one shortly after I took this picture.)

This calf had JUST been born and the mama was licking him off.  I love how all the other mama cows stand close by and protect the baby also, although they let us get right up next to him.  I think they were most leary about Tucker, who was also with us.

The entire farm (which they call a dairy, not a farm) has a natural cleaning system that automatically comes on.  The entire place is built on a slope, so when they turn these things on, all the water flows downhill and washes all the dirt and stuff away, and they come on quite frequently.  These cows were walking by and stopped dead in their tracks when they spotted Ben.  They wanted to get close, but were a little scared.  It was pretty funny.

We also got to see one cow being born, which a little help.  It was coming out wrong and they had to push it back in and then rearrange it and pull it out.  Fascinating, but sad also.  And I won’t gross you out with all of the pictures of that, but it was interesting to see.

We loved our day at the farm.  Tommy and Katie were great and we learned a lot.  And I also thought it was amazing that they said that his dad has over 50 (I think it was 50, might have been 75) relatives throughout the US and they are all dairy farmers.  His family owns 3 of them in this area alone.  So interesting to see what other people’s “normal” are and how different it is from our own.