A Month Later

If you can't tell, that's a heron sitting on a roof, which happens to be our neighbors' roof. That was the best picture I could get. This was taken mid-May.

Now look who we happened upon later, at a little lake not far away! We think it's likely the same heron. The surroundings here suit him much better. Well, it just looks like a him.

We had gone to the lake spontaneously on this particular Sunday afternoon looking for a nice place to shoot a few pictures. The girls were wearing these lovely dresses my mom bought them. Peter didn't exactly match, though, and it turned out that we had a time finding a place where the sun didn't seem too bright for at least someone, and getting everyone to look the same direction and smile without squinting in the sunlight was challenging, etc. So maybe spontaneous photo shoots aren't the best idea on a Sunday afternoon with several small hungry people. We didn't get much of anything that was very good for a group posed photo.

Tried moving locations but that didn't help. This was the best thing I got, where only one is even looking at the camera and the rest are looking down at some unknown thing! At least no one looks grumpy in this one, ha.

So I finally decided to try something more relaxed -- aahhh, that's better. What are they all looking at?

We have some visitors! Or I guess we are the visitors.

He seemed to be hoping we'd brought him a gift, preferably something edible. Guess we weren't the only hungry ones.

No food, huh? Well, back to the water then....

The children sure enjoyed watching them, and asked if we could get something to feed them.
Mr. Mallard
A goose family



John was holding Liberty, who was asleep while her picture-crazy mama was shooting many of these photos (John did some of them, though, like that excellent one of the heron in the water above).

It's fun to see them dive for food.




Our friend heron again, off to the next stop on his rounds, wherever that may be.

We were off to our next stop, too. I still hadn't given up on getting better pictures of their faces, though. I decided to try "divide and conquer," under our tree out front. I finally got something pretty good of each of them, yay! We'll have to try the group thing again sometime, perhaps with more planning involved.



Both Tirzah and I were thrilled when Tiberius the cat graced us with his presence during her session, she because she just likes him, and I because he helped her smiles be less work for both of us. I ended up getting several I liked, even if she wasn't looking at the camera much.











This one cracks me up. They all think it's pretty funny how the cats put their legs up in the air to wash themselves.

We didn't go back to feed the geese that day, but we did go a couple days later.



They were funny. The big ones would beg for food one instant, and the next instant they'd hiss at us. Our best guess is that although they wanted the food they were still nervous about us being near their young.





Here are some pictures of Liberty taken the same day.








These were taken almost a month ago, so of course she's changed. At her 6-week checkup yesterday she weighed in at 11 pounds, 13 ounces. Hopefully I can post again before another month passes. :)