Trampoline Family Fun!

Tonight was an absolutely GORGEOUS evening, and we just had to enjoy the weather by being outside. I love these peeks of summertime hidden between the blustery days and the rainy days of spring.

As you may have already guessed, before we knew it the whole family was piled onto the trampoline and Kevin pulled out our camera and our new wide angle lens. Kevin and I swapped turns behind the camera and everyone had a blast showing off and performing. Even Lanie got in on the action! :) Check out our fun and funky images . . .

Welcome, Noah Christian O'Dell!

My wonderful friend and business partner, Ashley O'Dell, and her husband recently welcomed the newest little addition into their family - Noah Christian O'Dell - on Saturday, March 28th. He is such a beautiful baby and was extremely cooperative for his first "official" photoshoot this past Thursday. Enjoy these great pictures of such an adorable baby boy!

Mourning My Loss

January was a very sad month here in the Autry household. There was a death in the family . . the death of our external hard drive . . . the location of all of my family photos and personal information. WAHHH HAAAA!!!! The loss has not completely registered yet or sunk in yet, but I know the pain and suffering has been great.

Gasp!!!

Sniff, sniff!!!

I am comforted somewhat in knowing that I have family photos up to March 2008 backed up on CDs, but everything else from March to December is no more. All our personal paperwork and saved files are adios, arrivederci, finito.

How does one recover from this? Well, I don't know yet, but I'll keep you informed. In the meantime, though, I am giving you all a homework assignment - go NOW and back up your photos and your files. "I already have them backed up on my computer, or on CD's" you might say. Well, my response is, so did we! Our external hard drive and CD's were our back-up, but obviously we put a little too much faith in hardware. Put your info on thumb drives. Put it on external hard drives. Put it on CDs. Make an extra copy. Make two extra copies and send one to a friends house. Take out stock in the CD manufacturer and buy an entire pallet of them from Costco. Don't risk anything!

Kevin is attempting to recover any files he can from our poor, lifeless hard drive as best he can. I'll let you know if there is any sunshine to report, although the diagnosis looks grim. Please pray for our troublesome hunk of plastic and metal! :)

M.I.A.

As you can clearly see, I have been missing in action for quite some time now. I was hit with a recent overload of crazy busyness and just have not been able to keep up with all of my communications. Our photography business has been blessed with an incredibly busy fall season, and it has been all that I can do to not become completely buried under the load! Then, on top of that, we recently discovered that our family is about to expand again - yep, that's right, baby #4 is due May 20, 2009! The exhaustion and the nausea have nearly completely wiped me out, and I am so ready for the first trimester to be over!

Homeschooling has been an up and down affair recently. We recently decided that our language arts and reading program were just not working for Elijah, and so we have taken a leave of absence from those subjects until I can order the right program. What happened is that I originally ordered the Sonlight Readers and Language Arts program for second graders because Eli is a fairly strong reader. Well, the Readers were at his level perfectly, but the Language Arts jumped way ahead of where he was at. We did our best to try to make it work, but in the end we are going to have to step back down to the first grade Readers and LA program. The Readers may be too easy, but hopefully we'll be on the right level for LA, and perhaps he'll be empowered by the ease of the books to read.

Also, because we have been so overwhelmed with Photography recently, we actually took a week off of school completely just so that I could make deadlines. It wasn't on our calendar and it may be a struggle to finish up the year before the new baby arrives, but I just felt for all of our sanity, that the break was absolutely necessary. I guess that's what homeschooling is all about - flexibility when you need it, right? :) We are now back to work and I am actually so thankful for it! During the break I decided that we NEED the structure to our day that homeschooling gives. The boys were bored frequently and this made them irritable and ornery. It seemed that the sibling rivalry was at it's worst that week! It was a frustrating time, but we were able to squeak out our deadlines and no one killed the other - an accomplishment for sure! :)

Well, I hope to stay on the ball a bit more now that the biggest few hurdles have been scaled. There is still a lot of demand from the photography end of things, but I am glad to have a least a little bit more calm and order to our days. I hope, too, that I am nearing the end of the yucky part of pregnancy so that I have more energy and a desire to eat again. . . here's hoping! :)