New Years Eve

I couldn't fall back asleep after Tristen woke up at 2:30 this morning, so after rolling around in bed till 3:50, I decided I'd get up and get a few things done, like continue to catch up on the blog. :-)

On Christmas Day, Duane and I both missed spending the day with our families. We were also missing the next best thing to famliy, our friends, the Maloufs who moved at the end of November two hours away in Syracuse. I talked a couple days after Christmas with Shelly Malouf and we planned for her family to come visit and spend the night New Years Eve. I was so excited and Kalvin was equally enthusiastic about seeing his friends, Hannah and Olivia. Duane was kind enough to take Tristen to the store with him for a couple hours while Kalvin and I cleaned the house and prepared the office room with a blow up mattress.

I had in mind that we'd go outside and play in the snow with the kids, but as it turned out, the kids just played inside and us adults hung out and ate A LOT and talked and talked. It was so much fun to catch up.

Here we are as a big group just before we put the kids to bed so we adults could experiment with lightpainting.

We set the camera to a 30 second exposure, gave Mike and Duane a flashlight and Shelly and I sat back and laughed as our husbands came up with these shots.

 Until you try it yourself, you just don't understand how hard it is to write with a flashlight for a camera. Duane's very good at his cursive and Mike took a couple tries to get the 2011 down (but hey, the swirls look cool, Mike!) ;-)

 

  Duane's swirl looked so cool (and easy enough to duplicate) that I thought I'd try it too, but after seeing my outcome here, I decided to just sit back down and watch the boys again.

 Since it was New Years, we thought it only appropriate that we have some kind of romantic pictures with our spouses. Shelly and Mike were cute here though I had a hard time getting the spotlight just right, so they got to take this picture over several times.

 Then, just before we broke to watch the movie 27 Dresses, I wanted to try out this cool trick Duane found online months again. The idea is to cut out any shape on a piece of paper and tape it to your lens (the shape has to be very small to be the size of your apature (about 1 cm) then all the different light sources in the picture will come out as the shape you cut out. It's a little hard to explain exactly, but here's how it turned out with our heart shapes.

 Between Mikes comments of our inside jokes, and Duane's movie impersonations, we had a lots of laughs. After having them come to visit, I was surprised at how much I had missed seeing them.