Lilac Time!

This post is long overdue. I have been wanting to get these pictures up since Sunday when I took them! But I wanted to play with them in photoshop and all that fun stuff, and so i've been working on and off and trying to narrow down what I would actually share here. It was NOT easy this time! So often I get just a couple good shots, and then I like to pick my very favorite out of those... but I took probably 200 pictures, deleted 50 or so, weeded through what was left to pick about 25 good shots and ended up with the 10 i have put on here.

So here is a recap of Mother's Day and our annual (official, as opposed to unofficial :) trip to Highland Park.


First things first: inhale deeply. I LOVE the smell of lilacs... for me, smells carry a lot of nostalgia. It can be either good or bad. Sometimes I will smell something that reminds me of a time long ago and be taken right back to the memory with such clarity that it's kinda weird. I mean i sometimes have memories from an old movie of when I was 2, 3, 4 and it's like I remember everything from just a smell but never knew i had that memory. Anyways, the smell of lilacs has GOOD nostalgia for me :) and the memories that come along with it are not specific, but more general as I have had the opportunity to make new memories with that smell throughout my life.


Next: mini photoshoot for my mom. I think that my mom is very photogenic, and I have quite a few pictures of her that I really like, but she doesn't always like them (you know how it is with pictures of yourself right?) I was pleased that she liked this one because it really captures her :)


Then we walked through the park for all of about 5.8 minutes before my brother's stomach got the best of him and we rerouted to the concessions. ahhh yes. the concessions. Please refer to this post for more details on that adventure *smirk*


On the way to foodz (term coined by Dan and accepted by all) I spotted so many lovely tulips... the colors were amazing. What I thought was especially cool was that often when you see tulips they are paired with tulips of the same color. These were all mixed colors, so they all stand out so nicely. I've taken pictures of so many this spring and so many times i've gotten one big mass of color as they tend to blend in 2D :)


This is MY picture. This picture amazes me. Hold on for a second and let me realize that I actually took this. Ok, ok, i'm sorry. Don't take this momentary lapse of humility as a serious pride problem in my life :) It's just so much different than the pictures i am used to taking, and it takes me out of the box in my head that i get stuck in sometimes. I seriously look at it and think there is no way I actually took that. Maybe some little elf got a hold of my camera while i wasn't looking and snapped this shot. However, that logic is flawed in that I can tell by the height of the camera when the picture was taken that there is NO way an elf could have achieved such altitude. Unless of course he was a special elf... like Will Ferrell maybe?

This one was taken by Dan as we trailed far behind my parents. I really like this of myself, but am bummed out that the background is more in focus than I am :( I would have had him retake it, but the reason that it's slightly blurry in the first place is because there were people about to walk into my background and he had to snap it quickly. If we retook it, then there would be a lovely family of 5 walking away :) oh well, such is life!

Traditions are hard to come by in our family. This is one though that I hope will stick. It's actually kind of new... we used to drive by Highland Park on Mother's Day occasionally when my Grandma was still here with us, but up until last year or maybe the year before it wasn't an actual tradition like it is now :)