A long overdue trip to the zoo

A while ago my little brother decided that our families ought to spend more time together. Once a month for birthday Sunday just wasn't enough. He was even willing to take charge and organize activities for us. That's Jared, he's amazing like that.

So, for our first activity since the decision, we -or rather, Jared- decided that we would go to the zoo. We haven't been in a while so I thought this would be fun, even though it was kind of early in the morning.

We hadn't even seen the baby elephant yet, I think she's almost a teenager now.

Apparently, Scott really wanted me to take a picture of him since he hopped in front of my elephant picture.

That's better.

There were a lot of changes since we last visited the zoo.  The whole new area for the otters, seals, and polar bear were amazing.

The polar bear was fun to watch.  He'd swim towards the wall...

Then push himself backwards into the water again.  He did this several times.

Then he got up and walked away.

The giraffes have always been my favorite.

I caught this one on his way up from bending down to eat.

We tried to get a picture of the cousins.  My older boys were impatient and had gone on ahead.

This monkey(I know I'm being technical here with the names) was happy to pose for us.

We decided to get tickets for the carousel but we were the only ones.

The boys still had fun.

Brigham loved it.  Sometimes, my favorite reaction from him is just a small smile.  That's what he did here.  So cute.

Luckily, we all had tickets for the train.

Here's Jared and Kristy with brand new cousin Brandon.

It was a fun trip, I'm glad Jared was willing to put it all together.  I can't wait for the next activity.

What is my blog for?

I've been asking myself that question every once in a while over the last several weeks.  I haven't updated in a while and even though I have things I could post about, I haven't been able to motivate myself to post about them.  I already scrapbook so I don't really need another medium for recording family happenings.  I had been just posting about any event that had pictures to accompany it, but I'm wondering if that's all it is.  I guess I'd like it to be more on one hand, but it's also time consuming and hard to sit down and get my thoughts out.

I'm really just thinking out loud here, and as I think out loud, I have a sneaking suspicion that it really boils down to the fact that I'm just being lazy.

My dad called to see if I could help him solve a problem he's having with Blogger.  As I was trying to help work it out I uploaded a test picture.  These are the pictures I chose to test with, so I suppose this is what I'd like to post about.

These are pictures I have taken over the last month or so that I'm really proud of and I'm even considering entering them in a photography contest through Jaaromy's employer.  I hope you enjoy them.

This picture was taken from my driveway.  It was still raining so I had to stand under the tree to take it.  I have been dying to see a full rainbow ever since I figured out how to stitch photos together.  Finally, it came.  This is six pictures stitched together.

This one I took just this past full moon.  I wanted to try different settings on my camera to see if I could get a better picture.  I'm not sure if it was the settings or the fact that I forgot I had wanted to take pictures of the full moon and didn't remember until after midnight so the moon was overhead and thus a much clearer shot.  Either way, this is the best picture of the moon I've taken so far.  I'm happy with it.

So, there you go.  I've finally updated my blog and it was something a little different and more personal.