I have cleaned out the camera to make room on the SD card for a big blast of images that will certainly keep me busy for several nights. These are some very cute candid shots I got of both Olivia and Minsc. I also got a lovely one of some flowers at church that I certainly will need to blow up to a larger size to frame. It’s nice when you can avoid going to Bed, Bath, and Beyond for wall art

I love her eyes. I don’t know whose eyes she inherited yet, but they’re gorgeous! Perhaps she has a healthy mixture of both of our eyes. I swear I think they’re going hazel, which is just wicked cool!

Olivia sucks her thumb and rubs her head when she’s tired. It’s almost as good as saying “PUT ME TO BED PLEASE!!!”

Flowers at church:

And finally, Minsc… my sweet boy!

Ah and you may have noticed I altered my watermark a bit. I felt it was better to do something less distracting to the eye but still protect my images from web-quality printing and copyright infringements.

Olivia turned 11 months last Friday. Today we ventured out to the park to take some snapshots for this month’s photos. She was a trooper, especially considering she barely slept all day and was screaming at daycare for most of the late afternoon. She did well for about 15-20 minutes and then we packed up and headed home.

This month we’ve been graced with crawling, pulling up, tantrums (oi vey!), new sounds, and mimicking behavior. It’s been an awesome ride and that first year is soon to come to a close. We’re swiftly exiting those precious baby months and soon she’ll be a toddler. That scares me out of my mind!

Ah and before I forget, she has a third tooth now! The top two aren’t coming in, which technically is the correct order. Instead, her incisors are coming in. Yay… carnivore!

And my ultimate favorite… the “WTF” look:

Happy First Father’s Day to Maurice!

Today we didn’t do anything, per his request. We’ve just lounged around the house like slugs. It’s awesome. Last night we picked up the antique chair I’ve been raving about all week. It is a gorgeous Victorian chair with a dark yellow velvet upholstery. I love this style of chair. It’s just so gorgeous. Considering the condition of the piece, the price we paid was a steal! I took a few shots of Olivia in it before we put her down for her last nap of the day. She was overly fussy, so I couldn’t compose the shot I would have liked.

The chair:

Baby in the chair:

Now for the fun part of last night’s tale… After leaving Annabelle’s birthday party, we went to go pick up the chair in Alexandria. This was great, because Olivia napped and chilled in the backseat. She started fussing when we were about 10 minutes from our house on the return trip. We figured it was because she was hungry and tired of the car seat. Oh no, that wasn’t it. We looked in the rear view mirror and noticed streams of vomit pouring out of her mouth. Horrific. It was like a Swedish horror film, complete with meatballs and bad dialects. We quickly pulled over at the McDonald’s on 28 and proceeded to strip her down and clean out the car seat. So we’re sitting in the McDonald’s parking lot with a vomit-covered baby screaming at the top of her lungs from the back of our Jeep. Lovely. People must have thought we came from a van down by the river. In any case, it was simply car sickness. The exit to 28 from I-66 is very curved, so it must have made her quite queesy. This should prove interesting in coming weeks.

Oh and crawling? Yeah… we don’t talk about crawling. Let’s just say that we’re getting more exercise from chasing her than from the Wii Active at this point.

Stargate SG-1 references aside, remember that little growth spurt thing I mentioned in a previous post? Well it’s done, and typically a growth spurt leaves behind a treasure trove of goodies for Mommy and Daddy to get surprised over. Well one of those things happens to be crawling. The other is pulling up to standing. Olivia crawled first this morning for Maurice when he was getting ready for work. Talk about being caught off-guard… typically she just sits in one spot and plays with her toys. Imagine how he felt when he walked back into the basement from the garage to find her on the other end of the room playing with the umbrella stroller! Next, the daycare teachers were so excited to show me tonight, that they opened the door to the infant room all the way and called to Olivia. She came crawling right to me, giggling the whole way. Now that’s just peachy! They said she’s been pulling up on nearly everything she can get her hands on, so they bet walking isn’t too far behind. It’s time to make a trip to Stride-Rite!

I was lucky enough to catch this on video tonight. That will be at the bottom of the post after all the pictures I took outside today. It was the first break in a while from the nonstop evening showers. Olivia was happy to oblige. I didn’t watermark these images, because they’re practice images and not something I would say would be “professional” quality worthy of the watermark. I used my 28-135mm zoom lens on these shots. I’ve barely touched it, as it doesn’t get the same amount of sharpness as my 50mm f1.8 II prime lens. It’s a shame though, because the 28-135mm is a very good lens. I just need to practice more with it before doing real shoots with it mounted. I also practiced metering and lighting this evening. I think it turned out well. She was brighter than the background, so I spot metered most of these images as evaluative metering led to overexposed images.

This past weekend I ran off to Raleigh for my kid sister’s high school graduation. Wow. High school graduation — Elizabeth is making me feel old! Maurice stayed behind in Virginia to take care of  Olivia and keep an eye on work, since he’s responsible for monitoring this latest server release. She did quite well until Sunday morning rolled around, at which point she started to freak out if he walked away from her. We figured this is just the typical disruptive tremors caused by her growth spurt that she experienced Friday and Saturday. Eat eat eat… sleep sleep sleep. That’s what Olivia did those two days. So far it seems the growth spurt presents are going to be pulling up and crawling. She took three crawling steps toward Maurice on Saturday morning and the daycare teachers have told me that she was moving around quite a bit on Monday. I’m actually looking forward to crawling. I want to chase her around and have active playtime.

As part of my trip, I took several pictures. First on the plate was to take Elizabeth’s senior portraits. She had received portraits from another studio in the area, but that studio has ties to the high school and is what I like to call a “portrait mill.” This isn’t to knock them really, since their primary business is to take quick headshots of seniors for the yearbook. I just don’t like their tactics. The students have to go to that studio, or their pictures won’t be in the yearbook. It kind of paints those young adults into a corner. Well, we just can’t have that now can we?!? I took about 30 shots of Elizabeth up at the Southern Baptist Seminary campus. It’s a lovely campus, with big old buildings and magnolia trees. We had a blast up there. We also made our way over to the high school to take a few shots.

Here are Elizabeth’s portraits: (all portraits viewed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgianelson/sets/72157619737291549/)

I also took pictures of my niece Natalie while I was there. Sarah hasn’t been able to get any really good portraits done of Natalie since she was born, so I’m happy to oblige! She’s adorable, petite, and all over the place. It was tough to contain her to one area long enough to get a shot, so we ended up putting her in the basket sooner than I had hoped. That’s ok though, since they turned out great either way.

Here are Natalie’s portraits: (all portraits viewed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgianelson/sets/72157619737283777/)