Sunday dinner at Nan's and a photo shoot.

A few weeks ago my Grandmother asked if I would take a new picture of her Grandchildren and Great-Grandchildren.  So I sent out an email to try and coordinate a date to meet at Nans for a photo.  I figured why not use Nan's front porch.  We picked yesterday and since we were all going to be there we decided to have dinner with Nan and Pop to celebrate their 60th Anniversary.

Well yesterday turned out to be a BUSY day.  Aaron decided on Saturday to race and asked if Ava and I would come for a little while.  I have to be at Nan and Pop's at 3pm so Ava and I met Aaron at the track and stayed until about lunch time then went home for her nap.  While she slept I started preparing the apple dumplings for desert all the while with curlers in my hair.  It was have been a scene out of 1950 if I hadn't been wearing jeans...haha.

Ava by the way loves "bikes" and is her Father's daughter through and through.  She would drag me to the track to watch motos that weren't even her Dad's.  She would say "come on Mommy"...."look bikes"..."Mommy go ride bikes, come on"  because she wanted to go ride them...yikes.  Then we would watch Aaron and I would point him out on the gate and say see Daddy he is in the blue.  She would say "Go Daddy" "Come on Daddy" then when he was off the gate and going around the track she would yell "Go Daddy Blue"...it was so cute.

Ok, so after naptime I changed Ava into clean clothes and wiped her face and we headed off to Nan and Pop's for pictures.  We started with the Great-Grandkids and then I did some family shots for Jamie and Jason.  Then we hit a wall because two Grandkids were missing.  Turned out my brother had decided to head to Calvert County before coming (wrong direction) and Kate's work didn't let her off early as had been promised because they were too busy.  Soooooo....two hours later with literally minutes of sunlight left we packed ourselves onto the front porch and managed to get a few shots.  The shots didn't turn out as well as they would have with the proper sunset light since it was closer to dusk.  They are grainier and foggy but they still actually look half decent.  For the most part everyone was looking straight and smiling so I would call that a success.

The big success of the evening was following our dinner I got two really good shots of Nan and Pop sitting in Pop's recliner.  :)

Here are some samples of yesterday's (very stressful almost not existent) shoot.

The family shot for Jamie and Jason...

 This is actually my favorite because it was a reaction shot.

Then Aunt Bev decided to climb the tree so we did an impromptu Grammy and Grandkids shot.

Then we took our extra long unplanned break.

All smiles

And a little silly

We did a few more and then Ava decided to sit on the porch by herself....Juli went to sit with her and Ava had words for her on that.

Then the true prizes...

 This was after Pop put his arm around Nan and popped her on the chin...hahahaha

Saturday Morning in Santa's Workshop...crayon melts

This elf was busy getting to work on one of Ava's stocking stuffer's.  Throughout the year I have collected all of the restaurant crayons and any coloring casualties (aka broken crayons) out of Ava's box of "colors" (that's what she calls crayons).

Then I divided them up by color to see what I had.  Mostly primary colors, of course, since that's what the restaurants tend to give out.  I wanted to do confetti crayons and not solid crayons so I broke them up and just put them in my molds willy nilly.

I picked these up at Target in my favorite place...the dollar section.  They were perfect and let me be a bit more creative then your average muffin pan without having to spend too much money.  The whole point to this was to have a cheaper option for a stocking stuffer.

After they were sorted into the molds I popped them in the oven.

 I waited till they were melted and liquidy and turned off the oven and cracked open the door.  It was a great way to get a little extra heat in the house while Ava was secure in her chair eating lunch.  Once they had hardened enough to be moved I placed them on top of the stove to completely harden.  The ginger bread men and one of the candy canes gave me a tough time and cracked when trying to pop them out of the molds.  The beauty of silicone was that I could just pop them in the microwave to soften up a bit then into the freezer to harder real good.  Then they popped out perfectly.

The finished product....

 and when she colors with them she will get multiple colors on her page.  So fun!!!  I can't wait till she is a bit older and we have some fun broken crayon colors and can really get creative.