I don't think I necessarily have less time now that I am working- taking care of the kids was plenty time consuming, but I have had less mental space for picture organizing and blog post composition. I also had far fewer opportunities to take pictures of the kids. I took over 1200 pictures in the month of June, but only 675 from September through December, and that includes two major holidays. I guess the good news is that sorting through the pictures is a lot easier!
I am going to not worry about all that I have "missed" posting about, with one exception- my trip to Napa with Alaina. That was in July, and that folder has over 2000 pictures in it, and Alaina has already written the post, so revisiting that seems like a no brainer.
Currently, we are on day 3 of the January 2018 blizzard. I love making fun of NC and the way they act when it snows, but this storm was for real. We ended up with nearly a foot! It just kept coming down! It was amazing, and I am so glad the kids got such a fantastic snow fall to play in. The temps have been very tolerable, and they have played outdoors a lot. We did lose power for long enough that we thought it might stay off for a day or two, but it was restored in 9 hours.
On a photography note, I had a chance to do a winter week long "fun" class at the school I now work at, and I took the students to art museums and we all collected photos and videos for a vlog about the local art museums. This gave me a really important opportunity to play with my camera and a new to me technique called back button focusing. I am extremely happy with my results. I think people have fancier reasons for using it, but the reason it is helping me is that I have had to learn a new button sequence to focus, and in learning that, I have started to pay much more attention to my focus, and practice has made me much faster at selecting my focus point manually. Alaina had sent me info about it, and I hadn't gotten around to reading it, but after ruining a few Christmas photos that would have been amazing by letting the camera autofocus, I decided I had to try something. Learning it with my students that were willing to patiently wait for me to fiddle with my camera was perfect, and these are the first photos I have of the kids with it. You will probably think they look like what I generally post, which they do. But what you don't see are the piles of rejected out of focus pictures that I didn't have this time! Woot!
Early in the storm, before full accumulation. I was safely on the porch, feeling especially grateful that I had a zoom lens!
Kevin collected all the driveway snow to make snow mountain. They quickly decided to transform it into a tunnel, and Kevin graciously helped.
It was truly an overwhelming amount of snow. At one point, Gwen was stuck in the yard, and Stephanie had to rescue her. She tried carrying her for a while, but ended up resorting to kicking a clear path for her. It was just so much to trudge through!
This is maybe it for snow this year? This is our second storm, and Stephanie has missed 6 days of school! I was still off for Christmas during the first storm, but I did miss three days this week. And who doesn't love a snow day!
