He is clearly seen.

When I was little, our family camped a lot.  We camped with a good sized group of my mom and dad’s friends’ and their families.  The memories of those years are some of the fondest of all time for me.

Every morning all of us children (I’ll bet there were at times at least 15 of us kids) would beg our parents to take us to the pool.  Our parents would put us off until after lunch, typically.  But when we all got ready to go, we were quite a sight to see.  We’d walk from our “Woodchuck Hollow” (the little patch of land we all shared at the campground) and traipse over to the pool.  Our parents brought coolers full of beverages and us children ran wildly ahead of them.

Mr. Olson, one of my mom and dad’s dearest friends, wore a cape and carried a walking stick.  Can you envision this?  I’m telling you, we had fun.  All.  The.  Time.  The walking stick was the Hamanama stick.  And us children would take turns jumping off of the diving board screaming Hamanamanama.  Over and Over and Over again.  It usually only took ten minutes for our entourage to clear the entire pool of other patrons.  We were crazy.  But fun.

This year when we went out to the lakehouse for our family vacation, we organized the Hamanama games in tribute to those good old days.  We divided the family into teams, came up with games and created names and colors for each team.

We had a commissioner to officiate the games; mostly because she was 9 months pregnant and that was quite a respectable job for her.  Isn’t she cute?

The team opposing my team was called the change-ups; they wore blue.  My team was the brushbacks and we wore red.  Now this other team, they were bruisers.  Just look at that body language:

I mean really, how can you compete against people like this?

Ok, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit something.  The competitive nature of the games was brought on by this man:

Oh, the commissioner was not happy with my hot, hot, hottie.  He was ‘a complaining and shouting about calls and generally causing quite a commotion.

In all seriousness, we had fun.  The best game we played was the bucket game that my sister found online.  After attaching buckets to your head, each team chose a player to throw water balloons into the bucket for points.  It was great fun running around trying to catch those water balloons only to get soaking wet when you did.  Not to mention looking absolutely ridiculous.  Aren’t things more fun when you look like a moron doing them?

Except for the little ones, they always look cute.  No matter what they have on their heads.

Summer is surely coming to a close and school is in full swing around here.  And my sweet girls decided to give me a huge gift.  They let me set up a photoshoot with them!  I chose outfits and they modeled for me.  I told them we could do it at home and that no location would be required – they were all about doing it at home.

They look so model-y to me in these shots.  Thank you, sweet girls.  My heart sings when I look at you.  And thanks also to my favorite assistant – the hot, hot, hottie himself set everything up for me.

A few words about the clothing – For as long as I can remember I have adored everything Ralph Lauren.   I’ve never been quite cute enough to pull off RL’s clothing.  However, this year Miss M is more interested in that classic look.  It’s always fun to dress your children in clothing that you adore.

And about Livy’s clothes; poor thing just loved those black leggings and desperately wanted to wear them to school.  She had the full pout on yesterday when I informed her that leggings were not a part of the allowed dress for her school.  Full pout.  For most of the morning.

Isn’t it funny that I still call my brother by his childhood name?  I’m not even sure if anyone outside of our family calls him Jimmy.   Maybe it’s because he’ll always be my little brother; maybe because a childhood name carries with it great affection and nostalgia, I can’t exactly pinpoint it but I’ll always call him Jimmy.  Unless he asks me not to.

While on vacation a few short weeks ago, I took a lot of photographs of my family.  I’m so happy to be able to do it.  For me, there has always been something so important about capturing a moment in time.

These photographs of Jimmy, Kim, R & S were taken right after I took the ones of my sister and her family.  It’s lovely to be able to capture these moments.

Ten years ago when Dave and I were looking for a house to purchase, we knew exactly what we wanted.  We wanted an old farmhouse with a little bit of land.  We looked for a month or two and never came upon what we were looking for.  Our real estate agent never even showed us anything remotely close to what we asked to see and so we ended up in the house we are in now.  The house we are in now isn’t even close to an old farmhouse with land.

We found our dream house about half a mile from our current home just this week.  In fact, it’s in the same town we live in now.  It’s an old farmhouse, on five+ acres and it has several out buildings.  We figure one of the outbuildings would be for Dave’s carpentry projects (he’s an amazing carpenter); one would be perfect for a photography studio & the other would certainly be big enough to start building bigger boats.  The crazy thing is that in this economy it is insanely priced and we could afford it.

I think God is very funny.  I think He’s funny for two reasons.  Firstly, because if we did decide to look into purchasing this other house, the vision we had for our family for the next three to five years would completely change.

The second reason I think He’s really funny is that recently I’ve been convicted about my desire for the things of this world.  And I don’t like it one bit.  I’m charged to look heavenward; and not to love this world.  That’s hard!  I don’t think God wants us to be miserable or to deny ourselves everything we enjoy but I do think we need to take a good long look at the way we live.  I’ve heard it said that if you want to know where your heart is, look at your checkbook and your schedule.  How do I spend my money?  Where do I spend the bulk of my time; what do I do with the bulk of my time?

Thinking on those things doesn’t take away my desire for that beautiful farmhouse and that 5+ acres but it does make me take a hard look at what God’s desire for our lives is right now.

Here’s what I came up with tonight.

My comfortable place:

The beauty that comes from and is in my backyard:

Home sweet home.

Papa built us a firepit yesterday.  We spent the evening playing charades; and Papa and I shared a glass of Chianti.  {Mom – that bottle of Chianti you purchased at the lake that we never drank was unbelievably good.  Better than any we’ve ever had before.  Thank you!}

Does a girl like me really need anything more?

Having two little girls of my own makes me do an awful lot of reflecting on my own sisterhood with my baby sister, Julie.  It’s really a dagger to the heart when you see your oldest daughter being an incredible role model for your younger daughter and suddenly realizing that  you weren’t really that great of a big sister when you were growing up.  Kind of takes your breath away in a very bad way.  Very bad.  Tears are welling up in my eyes as I sit and write this; tears for the time I spent focused on myself during my youth.  If only I had focused more on my little sister.  I don’t suppose I’m much different than most teenagers in that I was pretty self-absorbed when I was younger.  The truth is, however, I desperately wish that I wasn’t like most teenagers when I was growing up.  I wish I had been different.  I wish that I wasn’t so concerned with my clothes and my friends and the places I wanted to go.   I wish I had taken my sister under my wing and brought her along in a maternal kind of way.  I’m trying to make up for those selfish years now.

I’d do anything for you, Jul.  I love you lots.

The canoe turned out absolutely beautifully.  I’m planning to put all of the photographs together in one place.  That will happen when I find 27 extra hours in the day

Just a few images from last week’s vacation with my family.

Sometimes when I have a ton of photographs from an event, I come across one that strikes me.  I took a lot of photographs last week during our vacation, but there was one of my littlest nephew that about killed me. He looks nothing short of an angel in this photograph.  He’s got a homemade buff on his head – we divided into teams and played survivor games and my mom is cool enough to have taken the time to sew buffs for each team.  ”J” was on the “Change-ups” and their designated color was blue.

A photograph of the lake early morning during a quick little fishing jaunt we took with the girls.  We had NO luck catching anything but had a sweet quiet time together.  I adore early morning.

A family photograph:

I happened to snag this one while I was setting up for the big family photograph above.  My youngest and GrandMary happened to be sitting together and this was a tender moment my camera caught.  Remember the boat we began building earlier this summer?  The finished vessel is sitting right behind them.

All of the children enjoy fishing, which is nice for Dave because it’s something that just seems to be in him. Little “J” was  so proud but wasn’t quite sure at first if he really wanted to be that close to that little sunfish.

Isn’t this one of the most beautiful sights in life?  My gorgeous sister is due very shortly.  And I cannot wait.

My girls are getting pretty bored with being my models so I was overjoyed when the mom of these beautiful girls asked me to photograph them.

Many of us moms often put on “mommy goggles” and therefore, think that our children are really the most awesome kids in the whole wide world.  Right?  Come on don’t leave me here alone.

While I was editing some of these photographs, two things happened.  I ripped my mommy goggles off and got a close up glimpse of the amazing work God does.  These girls; this family (so much like mine with two loving parents and two little girls) is astonishing.  And I don’t say that lightly.  The girls were a complete joy to work with not to mention amazingly gorgeous and spunky.

The second thing that happened while I was going through these photographs: I received an email from a missions team I have been praying for.  A group from my church is doing missions work in Argentina this week.  And one of the prayer requests in the email struck a cord with me.  This is what it said:  Pray for Pastor Daniel and the church in La Catolica, as they have so many children with an otherwise hopeless (apart from God) life; and We have seen people living out faith in God right where they are, in (to us) extremely harsh conditions.

We rejoice in our children and here in America are afforded the luxury of giving them so much.  I was reminded that God has blessed us with tangible “goodies”; things we don’t deserve.  And we dare not forget it.

“A” family – I loved every moment of being with you.  Our families mirror each other’s in bunches of ways.  Thanks for letting me take a peak  This post is image heavy because I couldn’t choose just a few – there are so many good ones!

I have to give props to my mom and dad here.  Isn’t that the cutest lemonade stand ever?  They made it years ago for Mak to sell lemonade at.  I adore it.

The second family shoot I had while in Northern Indiana was with a family of five.  An all American family of five!  The shoot was scheduled for a Sunday afternoon – we only had a short period to get it all done because this sweet family has places to go and people to see!  Just take a look – all American, right?

While in Indiana last week, my friends booked us a room at a beautiful place called the Essenhaus.  D’s dad planted a beautiful quilt garden on the property.  Looking at the garden, it is easy to see that it took a lot of time to plant it.  So much care went into the planting of the garden and it shows.  I wasn’t the only person up early taking photographs it.  It is beautiful.