Photo Shoot

Some of you may, or may not, have noticed my absense of posts for the past few days. I had an out of town guest and we were just hanging out. She is from texas, and I met her online! I met her about 5 years ago on the antiquated Myspace. Back when there were groups and people interacted together there. We have been great friends and I have always loved the stories of her boys. She was coming my way and said that she would come a day early if I would like to meet in person. I went the extra step and said she could come stay with us and visit! crazy I know but I am so glad that I did!

We had a great time. She learned to cook a few of my recipes and we had some lovely meals together. I taught her how to make my beef stew, and my chili. She took some lovely photos of each step of the stew, I will be posting that recipe this week. I will also be posting my recipe for Chili but we only have a finished shot of the chili no step by steps there.

My friend also happens to be a wonderful professional photographer. I know she has her own studio and I will have to see if she has a web page for it so I can link it! While she was here she did a photo shoot with each of us and family portraits outside in the beautiful Virginia countryside. I am so happy to be able to share these pictures with you all.

The whole family

Me

My husband and I

The Bookworm

Mr Fixit

The Spitfire

My cuddlebug

Dad & kids

 Mom & Kids

 I hope that you all enjoyed these pictures! I am so grateful for them.

a week of blogging silence

Means that I was sooooo busy this week that I simply did not have time to sit and post a blog about all the things we were doing!

My mom surprised me with a visit. She knows we will be leaving the state soon and will be far enough away that it isnt likely that we will get to spend a lot of time together. So she took time off work and flew home from Alabama where she is traveling for work and came to visit us. She also picked up my Aunt and my Sister came down from Washington state. We got to spend time together doing lots of fun things.

We hung out and went to the movies together... We saw Gnomeo & Juliet totally cute movie. Not as great as some of the others we have seen but certainly cute.

We had a girls day and got our hair done. Talk about a blast! Sitting in a little beauty salon gabbing for hours.

We went up to a giant antique store and spent all of 45 minutes (cuz we had lunch first and didnt realize we took so long at lunch) walking around the store.

My family ended up camping out at my house instead of going home to my moms because of the snow storm that hit the area the day before my mom flew in. The snow storm was so bad that it dumped about 2 feet of snow on the mountain and was so cold that it froze trees snapping them off all over up there and wrecking havoc on them all. knocked power out for 6 full days up there on that little mountain top. My parents have a generator but the well does not hook up to a generator so when the power goes out there is no water. This can get ugly fast with no flushing toilet.

We did take the kids up to the snow yesterday. Its been long enough that the snow lower down had melted most of the way and my parents had power again at their place. So we took the kids up a little farther into the mountains and allowed them to play where the snow was until they were soaked through. Then we loaded up the car and took them back to mom & dad's to change and eat something hot. Dad had hot cocoa ready as soon as we walked in the door and then we ate lasagna, french bread and salad. It was nice to have a warm dry spot to sit and relax.

I have pictures of some of these things but they are still on the sd card and I am just being lazy so look for them to suddenly appear on the blog soon.

Thanks for understanding my silence was filled with loads of fun and it was just to hard to squeeze in writing in between all that fun.