some iphone pictures

We're having some fun playing around with Chris' new iphone he got for his work.  The speed with which it takes pictures is truly amazing.  But you have to hold your hand really still.  We never did claim to be great photographers even with a regular camera.  Oh well, at least these capture a few memories.  Recently we were looking at some pictures from Chris' growing up years.  There aren't many, and they aren't great photos, but they bring back such dear memories.  The scrapbook my family kept for me is of similar value.  Not a LOT of pictures, but they are precious.  I have to remind myself of that, because some people blog hundreds of pictures every year, and they are all studio-perfect and I get intimidated by them constantly.  

Okay, now isn't this enough to just make you smile right back?

 My niece Charity at one of the Christmas "concerts" we did with my sister Joella's family.  The 2 babies are about the same age, but Laura is just enough older that she wants to "baby" our baby!!!!  :-)

 Wow!  Should have cropped out the messy kitchen.  Oh, well.  Cute kid, anyway.

 Our girls with their 2nd cousins (boys) who very kindly let them share their fun toys.  I'll try to get a picture of the girls in their matching dresses I made them for Christmas, now that I've finally got a deeply-rooted stain out of Elisabeth's collar.  I really like Oxyclean by the way, although I'm not sure if it was just it or the combination of about 3 different soaps/stainremovers I used about 4 times over that finally did the trick.

 We daughters-in-law talked our parents-in-law and our husbands into taking a little trip to Southern Illinois over New Year's instead of doing such a large-scale gift exchange for Christmas. We stayed at Rimrocks Cabins (we rented 2) and it was truly a dream come true.  Might even become a tradition.  It was just a lovely getaway.  We played games, and ate lots, and took a couple neat drives, and just had a lovely, relaxing time.  My sister-in-law Lori and I share a dream for our children, to make memories from fun things like this that don't cost a lot of money and that don't take hours to get to.  It was less than 2 hours to drive there, and it was soooooooo much fun.

Chris and I and our girls stayed in this dear little cabin called Bear's Den.  There are 5 cabins on this property, each with the name of a different wild creature: the rest of the family stayed in Eagle's Retreat.

Chris took this amazing picture of the Ohio River.  Chris' family has made many memories down in this neck of the woods.  They used to go camping down here from time to time.

Lydia is "bothering" Grandpa.  He appeared to be actually asleep.  He loves his baby girl, and is quite tolerant, I guess.

Not being content with just teaching Elisabeth how to make faces, Chris is now working on Lydia.  She had this little hometown "eatery" in a fizzle with her antics.