So many changes!

At the beginning or so of this week (yeah, I think it was the 25th), Nathan looked especially patriotic in his red/white/blue plaid shortalls and his red polo (complete with a dark blue stripe around the neck). So, we decided to take 4th of July pictures. I couldn't find the flag I bought last year for our pictures and he wouldn't sit near the red flowers (their texture was a bit overwhelming and "loud" for him...silly...), but we did the best we could. It was a complete opposite of last year's 4th of July pictures, where he was scared of the grass so he wouldn't get off the blanket!

I decided it'd be fun to share a few favorites and compare them with last year's pictures. It still blows my MIND how much they change the first couple years. I see 25 cent baby clothes in 3T size and I just can't make myself buy them (we have the room and empty bins in storage...why not?) because I can't stand the fact that he'll be three one day.

Cue all of you seasoned moms telling me "just wait until..."

Here is my all-time favorite picture of him. I was chasing this crazy kiddo around, adjusting my camera settings to allow a shutter speed of at LEAST 1/600th of a second, and still a balanced histogram no matter how my light was. Which was rough, but we picked a golden time of day, so it all worked out.

 I love this picture of my Nathan. I didn't have to crop it or anything! (Although, from the reflection it looks like my camera is a dinky toy that I'm actually holding normally; it's just a distortion from his little lenses, I promise I wouldn't lie about something as silly as cropping a picture!) <--Message courtesy of my anxiety brain :o) 

At first I didn't like the reflection, and it would be more ideal without it, but I do love that it looks very real-life. I love the light we got on that side of the house, and the white siding made for a very neutral, not-distracting-yet-not-overwhelmingly-white backdrop. He's very "Top Gun" I think. 

Here are some other pictures from this year...I'm saving my favorites to send to grandparents/great-grandparents/aunts & uncles this week, so I don't want to give them all away! I tried to line them up with similar pictures from last year...check out how much this kiddo has changed! My how I miss that uber-round, chubby little baby face!

(Click on the collages to see them bigger; I wanted them to fit in the frame of the blog template!)

Oh, and as a fun detail, I pulled the blue background color for both of these collages right from his eyes in the picture from the 2011 collage (the one on the far left).

We still have a brand new family set of 2012 flag shirts (one of my family's favorite traditions) that we haven't worn yet, but I married a sweet man who just hates having his picture taken.  So we'll see if we even get a picture in the shirts!

I took the 2011 pictures the very first time I used my all-time favorite lens, my "nifty fifty" (50mm 1.8). Ohh I love me some dramatic bokeh! I fell in love with this lens on this little shoot. Look at his shiny eyes! I love how you can't tell he was sitting in front of the nastiest fence on our street (that we happen to share a yard with...yay...) in the 2012 pictures, and a very industrial-looking apartment building in the 2011 ones. This lens has always made our apartments (and their buildings) look way better than they ever have in real life! And that nasty fence has become one of my favorite places to take pictures!

Well that post was much ado about nothing, now wasn't it! Oh well, nothing's really new with us! Mitch is 3 weeks away from his semester off (September-December) and he's SO burnt out, but has been such a trooper! He is currently working 2 jobs and donating plasma when he can. My photography business has boomed, as I have more time on my semester off to dedicate to shoots (i'm only doing 2 credits this semester), so when the studying gets rough, we have the padding in our budget to let him take a week or two off from plasma without it hurting us. I have also been babysitting the 2 sweetest little girls ever, one (8 months) comes 3 times a week and the other (4 months) comes a couple times a month. This allows me to justify staying at home with my boy and not having to find a job on my off semester. 

Nathan is huge and is just busier than ever. If I were to "go, go, go!!" like that all day, every day, I would be dead by the end of the week! I don't know how he has so much energy!

Well, that's us!