Our 10 of 2014

In the Dutch speaking blog community we are throwing things at each other, we are throwing invitations to show our most loved moments of 2014 captured by a photograph. TamTam threw me one of those invitations and I happily caught it. I loved looking through our picture archive, I have not been doing it enough this year. In the previous years I kept our photo albums up to date, but the time I spent on that activity (and on many other activities) has now turned into sewing time.

As many others before me, I  had a hard time selecting only 10 pictures. I therefore cheated slightly and decided that the goal of this post is to show 10 happy memories, and some of these memories need more than one picture.

The first happy memory is from the first warm day of this year, somewhere in March. We packed up the kids and some food and held a picnic at a nearby play yard (together with many more families).

In this second picture I am baking cookies with the kids. Our youngest was in a phase that she wanted to be held all day, so I carried her a lot at that time.She really has grown this year!

The third picture shows our three eldest playing house in a cardboard box. Our kids love cardboard boxes (as most kids I presume) and whenever we have a big box, the kids play with it until it is torn to pieces.

The fourth event is one of our trips to the local zoo. For three years we had a a subscription to the zoo. This particular zoo is like a beautiful park and it is the perfect outing on a sunny weekend day. The small picture shows our two eldest walking hand in hand, I love seeing that they are such good friends.

The fifth picture is made at a nearby lake. This spring we had extremely nice weather and being near the water was a lot of fun. This time I went alone with the three eldest kids (because the youngest was still sleeping a lot) and the kids build sand castles for hours.

I made the sixth picture when I was trying to create this years fathers day present. Inspired by Pinterest I wanted to capture the shadows of kids. Making a nice shadow picture was harder than I anticipated and in the end we created a different present, but this picture is one of the few pictures that has all our kids on it. After trying to make the gift picture, the kids just played outside and I shot some more pictures. I love the smaller picture because it really portrays our eldest in her pure form. Dreamy, not really aware of what she is doing, hanging on something while her underwear is showing.

The seventh picture is again made at the small lake. It was the first time we went there as a whole family. Our youngest loved to play in the sand. She looks like a catalog baby in this picture (usually she looks like a little troll, adorable in her own way, but far from resembling a catalog baby).

On the eighth picture we are celebrating the birthday of our sons teddy bear. We were driving home from a day at a amusement park when my son announced in the car that it was his bears birthday! We all played along with it and when we arrived home I turned some leftovers into a cake, took some small balloons and gift wrapped a bottle of honey while the kids dressed up for the party.

I love to send picture Christmas cards and I prefer to have something different every year. This year we opted for a "falling leaves" picture. On one of the last nice days of a very warm fall we went to the forest and shot some great pictures, not the "perfect"one I was looking for but for everyone's sake (making the "perfect"picture can create some tensions) I made it work.

The last picture is an even rarer picture than all our kids together (my son is usually boycotting those). It is a picture of just me and my husband. Over Christmas we received a tripod. While I was setting up the tripod to make a picture of a part of our extended family my husband proposed to make a picture of us, to test the settings. The quality is not great, we switched off the lamp later, and used the flash, but I still love the picture.

I think that everyone who wanted to catch the invitation, has already caught it, so I will just end with wishing everybody a happy next year!