Senior Portrait Gift

This morning I had the privilege of gifting a senior portrait session to a great young man.  Nikolai and his family live down the street from us, and they have been such wonderful neighbors and friends for years now. For a short time, I had Nikolai's older brother Ilya as a piano student. His mom, Donna, and I pray together each week and are the current Ridgeview Moms In Prayer group. Nikolai was the lone senior on Jeremy's team this first official season of Ridgeview High School wrestling, and he joined the team having never wrestled before.  This kid has guts.  He also has great character. And he is about to graduate from high school.  He wasn't going to have senior portraits taken, as he didn't want to ask his parents to pay the astronomical amounts professionals charge. His mom and I were talking about that, and I offered to do some.  

The kids were off school again today, and I had scoped out a few places in little ol' Arrowsmith that I though might have cool backgrounds and settings. So we met at the "golden hour" which was 7:10 a.m., in order to have the best light.  I'm having trouble with my camera and kept getting an error message which made me either turn the camera off and back on or remove the battery between every picture.  That made things more difficult, but I also used my iPhone a lot, because it knows more than I do about choosing the right settings for the light.  

Mom wanted pictures in the wrestling warmups.

 Nikolai wanted pictures in his suit.

His dad owns this cool building in Arrowsmith where he has his chiropractic business.

This light is why we take pictures during the golden hour!

Although he was just goofing around and being himself in these next couple pictures, I really do think he could do professional modeling.  He's not a bad looking guy.

This is my favorite shot of the day.  He's just squatting down in front of a big grain bin, but it is Nikolai's favorite shot too.

 We spent quite a bit of time on the train tracks, and I really like the interest and angles the tracks add.

Donna brought the chair from their home.

This great brick wall is part of the chiropractic building too.  It used to be a bank.

Mom's favorite.  

Good times with mom during the photo shoot.

This spot was Donna's idea.

Nikolai said he felt like he needed a newspaper to read at the bus stop.

One of us said something funny, so we got a real smile from a laugh.

We drove out about a mile outside of town, so we could barely see Arrowsmith down the tracks in the background.

We had long since lost the golden light by this point--about 3 hours later. But it was really fun, and we ended up with close to 700 pictures. I probably only threw out 10 because the guy just doesn't take a bad picture!

  I decided I wouldn't want the pressure of being a professional portrait photographer, or to spend a week editing every session, but this was a great experience, and the very least gift I could give for this young man who is about to go off to Army basic training and give his all to serve our country.  God bless you, Nikolai. 

Caeden Selfies

One of the reasons our kids *think* we tell them they can't have social media accounts is because they won't want stupid-looking selfies posted all over the eternal internet.  But they don't always know that sometimes we post them for them.

It does always make me laugh when I look through pictures on my phone or iPad and find stuff like this.  

Happy Easter

He is risen! He is risen, indeed!

We celebrated Easter with our PoC family this morning.  Dave Zaring took some wonderful photos for our photography team, and caught this one while I was having a lovely conversation with Debbie and Nora.  I love our church family so much.

Annah helped in PoC K.I.D.S. this morning, and I played piano.  After church, I asked Jeremy if he would mind taking the kids home, so I could get home and finish cooking lunch.  He said he had a "mission for Caeden," so he'd take them all. When they got home I had mashed potatoes, green beans, and gravy going on the stove.  But!  I wanted a family photo before they changed, so we rushed out the front door and I put my phone on my gorillapod and set the timer.  

This one turned out great--before I got into the picture.

My floating head is in there...ha!  Not quite the picture I was hoping for, but I didn't want lunch to burn on the stove while we were waiting for the 10-second timer!

We all got into our comfy clothes and enjoyed our lunch.  Then we relaxed at home for the rest of the day!  

It turned out that Jeremy had stopped by Meijer with the kids, and the "mission for Caeden" was buying an Xbox!?!  I'm not sure where that idea came from, but here it is...

...I guess this is the Easter basket this year.

It was wonderful to spend Easter Sunday worshipping our risen Savior with our church family, and relaxing at home with our immediate family.  

Trip to Tuscola

After I taught my lessons and Jeremy mowed the yard this morning, he took us to Tuscola.  We like to go there at least a couple times a year for some good shopping at the outlet mall.

On our way, Jeremy asked me to look on my phone and see if there was a local ice cream place that looked good.  Thanks to Yelp, we found an absolute gem!

Flesor's Candy Kitchen is a darling old-fashioned candy store/soda fountain/ice cream shop/restaurant, where everything is handmade and homemade!  And it feels like you're going back in time before you even enter!

When we walked in, we were asked, "Ice cream or lunch?" Since we had already eaten, we sat at the soda fountain for ice cream.

The girls both chose lemon chiffon, and Jeremy had raspberry.

I chose "Paul's Pecan Favorite--Turtle" and oh my was it rich!!!  

I couldn't even finish it, but it was SO good!

Caeden had a strawberry soda! He was in heaven.

Everything sounded so yummy; it was hard to choose.  And we definitely want to come back for a meal sometime!

I loved that they included the story of the family business on the menu. 

On the other side of the entrance was the candy counter.  We took a few minutes to admire the handmade candies, choose a few, and chat with the sweet lady who was working.

I chose cherry sours, Caeden chose creamsicle gummy bears, Jeremy and Sylvia chose caramels, and the lady behind the counter wisely chose peanut butter pudding chocolates for Annah and her braces.

I was excited to see Divinity!  I've never seen it anywhere other than my Grandma Mc's!

The candy counter lady recommended we walk up the street a ways to an art gallery/shop, so we did!

It was full of a huge variety of amazing artwork for sale!

The girls really liked the steps, and wanted pictures to see if they could convince the school to let the art classes do this.

We finally made it to the outlet stores, and started at VF. Caeden was already not having it.  Jeremy tried to help by taking him to Under Armor, Nike, Reebok, but as Caeden put it, he didn't want a $50 shirt.  He begged me all day long to go somewhere that sold X-boxes or video games, but I don't think there were any of those around, and I don't want an X-Box in my house.

We also went to Old Navy, Rue 21, Maurices, American Eagle, and others.  Sylvia can put together some elegant outfits and model them with such ladylike style...

We girls all found shoes at Famous Footwear.

We all found it pretty humorous that there was a Pringles vending machine outside the shoe store.  Nothing else in it but Pringles!

Heading out!

We stopped at the Denny's diner for supper.

The guys didn't want to take pictures.

It was a really fun day together!