Good to be back--and with photos!

Well, I'm back from vacation and finally blogging again! We had a fabulous time on our trip, and my next post (hopefully tomorrow) will go into details, but today has to be a fast post as I have to run a whole bunch of errands. So today I'm just going to post some photos from our brief photo shoot we did one night of our trip.

My entire family gets together so rarely that we always try to find the time for a photo shoot, that way we can all have updated photos of everyone, as well as a new group shot. I'm afraid that this year Spencer was less than enthusiastic about them and we pretty much had to give up on getting anything with him in it after a few minutes. Such a bummer as my brother likes taking photos just as much as I do and it was my only chance to have him take some for a year. Oh well, Spencer's behavior was mostly my fault as our crazy and busy schedule really tired him out--plus he is a two year old boy, and I've yet to met a 2 year old boy who likes his picture being taken :) Perhaps next year will go better. Ty and Blake were easy enough--they have had lots of training in the "smile please" department :) I only have to do a small amount of bribing to get them to change into their clean shirts. Here are a few my brother got while we tried to hold Spencer down for a moment.

Hopefully next year Spencer will smile too. These photos don't really capture just how much Spencer had had it--but trust me--he was beyond done at this point. I'm just glad he made it through the group shot first. That is the one photo he did well for!

And here are my dear sweet parents who made this trip possible! Thanks Mom and dad--It was such a great trip! And here are a few of the photos I took. This one is of my sister and her husband on this awesome bridge. Now why don't we have bridges like that around here? I would love to have this location nearby--it was perfect! Same bridge--this time my brother and his adorable family. I did a lot of them as, in contrast to my kids, their kiddos were in a great mood! Love my nephew's squinty smile! So cute! This one is my favorite of the bunch. I don't know what it is, but kids always seems fascinated when they see their parents kiss! I think my sister or brother-in-law took this one. I was walking back to the car with Spencer who was screaming at the top of his lungs at this point.

I love it when I can catch a family just talking and laughing together!

I Love this one too!

And I haven't scrapbooked in a while--so yesterday I threw a little something together. Another kraft background on this one. Boy do I love kraft! Thank goodness I can get it in packs of 25 because I go through it like crazy! These papers are more Cosmo Cricket Early Bird, with a bunch of Chatterbox and Queen and Company embellishments. Just click to see it bigger.

There will be more trip details and photos tomorrow or the next day, plus the winner of my giveaway, so stop by again soon! And have a great day!

A chance to win a gift certificate...

It's time again! Scrapbooks.com is having another sketch challenge with two of my sketches. Here is some info:

You can have a chance to win a gift certificate to the scrapbooks.com superstore if you complete a project based on one (or both) of these sketches and post it in the Scrapbooks.com gallery with a link to this thread by September 1st. That is a whole month to complete the challenge--plenty of time, so have fun with them!

I'm hoping some of you blog readers will join in the fun over there!