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  It’s hard having a birthday right around Christmas – it gets swallowed up in the holiday so we always make sure that Kelly’s is a special occasion. This year it’s developed into a several day celebration!!

Friday night we went out to dinner with Dave’s side of the family and some friends to Chicago Fire in Folsom, California. After pizza and birthday dessert we went to her house to relax, and spend some time together. The first pic is crossing the bridge into Folsom at sunset.

Saturday afternoon we went out to the movies. Kerri, Lindsay,Brian and I went to see new National Treasure then we met up with Dave, Kelly and his family to see I Am Legend.  Talk about edge of your seat!!! Both were good movies but very different.

After the movie, we all went off to dinner at Crush 29, with Kelly thinking we had other plans. But it was all a ploy – we came in as they had all sat down for dinner and surprised her. The highlight was that white coconut cake! We picked it up at a bakery and brought it in and they kindly put candles in it and served it to us. Since Kelly used to work there they gave us quite the service!!!  What a night! Its non stop from here out till the 27th kids! Hope you are finding time to enjoy one another.

The Fam

Front Row left to right:
Brian(our son), Kayla (Dave’s sister), Kelly, Dave, Alyssa (Dave’s other sister)
Back Row:Connie (Dave’s Dad’s girlfriend), David (Dave’s dad),Vince (Dave’s brother), Marcello and Lisa (Lisa is Dave’s aunt) and last but not least is Nonnie. Dave’s grandmother.   

Tomorrow morning we’ll be putting the finishing touches on our presents and getting the house ready for Morning Christmas here at our house,  Christmas Afternoon at my brother’s house, then Christmas evening at Lisa and Marcello’s.

Cant wait for Christmas Morning - to see Jayden’s face it is his first!!

Tomorrow we’ll be going to Christmas Service in the evening.

Hope you all have a Merry Christmas!

Love, The Lydells

Mark and I enjoying the snow covered beach at Lake Tahoe

                                                                    photo by Brian Lydell

News from the Lydell house….

Now that the studio is slowly grinding to a nice vacation atmosphere…
we were actually able to go see a movie and just hang out in our pajamas
for half the day! Wohoo! We decided on August Rush and loved it!
The music was beautiful and I loved the story. In case you havent heard about it here is the link:

August Rush

UPS showed up today with our Christmas Cards –
Now we need to get them out the door!!

Here is our family card…this was just taken at
Lake Tahoe when were up there last week.
Charlotte, you should recognize Hitler Snowman
who adorns the back!!

The inside is another shot on our way down to the beach at Lake Tahoe and the inset is a
picture of us at the local pumpkin farm. There were all these vignettes around the farm of
various scenes having to do with Thanksgiving. When we saw the pink sign at the bottom
which says “We Do Weddings”…we just thought that was just too perfect a picture of us!

Then of course we had to get some cards done of Jayden for Dave & Kelly. Many thanks to Tracie at Poeima210 The cover is one of her designs. She does beautiful cards and you should check her out. If you see this Tracie we owe you one!!! Thanks!!!  

Here is the inside….when Dave and Kelly showed up while we were shooting this
we got them in the action too!

***********************

We were so excited to have some dear friends, Scott & Donna stop by Sunday.
They moved away this year and decided to come down for Christmas and to
give Jaimy a fun 16th birthday party with her old friends from dance. We
visited and discussed the party and watched some of our latest weddings then
headed out to dinner at Ruby Tuesday.  We plan to meet up again as we are
shooting this shindgig!!! It is going to be pretty spectacular. So it looks like our
cameras wont be getting too much of a break….lol. Thats okay we dont want to
get too rusty before the next round of work hits. Not the best picture! But at
least I got something! lol 

If you are oldtimers here you might remember the slideshow we did of
Jaimy’s baptism which is posted on the sidebar. If you are new go watch
it. It was such a blessing to be asked to shoot something so personal and
yet so free to anyone who believes and wants eternal life with Jesus that
you want to share it with everyone. So here are our friends Scott and Donna,
Jaimy’s parents. Unfortunately Jaimy was not with them but she was having
fun visiting her old dance friends.

We are hoping to do some new stuff with the blog and to post up some new
images from this years latest weddings on our website. We have so many!
How do you pick who gets on and who doesn’t?!  

Looking forward to seeing the new images but it will probably take a few
days as Marks personal laptop decided to die. He is now running a program
to find all his stuff now that he has a new drive. It is scary how much stuff
we could lose on our computers! Especially as a business. But we triple back
up all our work keep a set off site So all is safe.

Are you all ready for Christmas??? Here is my skinny tree in an urn Target tree.
I cant believe how late I am this year. I usually cant wait till Thanksgiving is over
before I get the itch to get the tree and everything out. Not this year. Again I am
really ashamed to post some of these because I did not take the time to get a good
shot….blah.

In this shot I was actually trying something with my camera but it didnt work out.
I didnt have what I needed but I will try it again later and post it up I think you
will dig it if I do it right.

Here is a cool shot tho….

 IF it wasnt for Jayden I doubt I would even have this much done…not like me!
I want to make it as magical as it was for me when I was a little girl….I think I
need to go alot further than a skinny Target tree! lol

Okay for those who want to see the many more recent faces of Jayden Here is
a very quick collage of him with his favorite toy! The laptop! Eeks!

 He looks like he is watching a scary movie doesnt it? LOL!!!

Okay going Christmas Shopping ….have a great day!!!

We got away earlier this week for a few days to relax with our friends, George & Nancy: 

Lindsay had to work, so she stayed behind. She watches our grandson Jayden, so it was fun for her to go stay at Kelly’s house for a few days.

All of us needed a break to end the year – we’re all done with our weddings and shoots, and they only have a couple more so it was fun to get away. Of course, when photographers get together, what do they do???   They take pictures of course!!

We were only there for a couple days, and on the second day we had the first annual (hopefully) Lake Tahoe Shootout. Each of us had our camera, one lens, and 15 minutes to scour the grounds around our building. The catch? You could only take 6 pictures, so you had to make them count. We came back, loaded up our pictures and had a great time looking them over. there were some real creative shots! It’s a great exercise to teach you to think your photo’s out before you push the shutter…

Then we headed out for a walk to the beach. Our timeshare is about 1/4 of a mile from the Lake, with a nice trail to it.  Since George had the longest arms of us, he was elected to get the group shot:

We all took whatever shots we wanted to, and when we came back each of us had to sift through our shots and pick our top 15. (It was fun to edit images from each of us – that night Kerri and Nancy helped me edit some of these and when I got home I finished the rest off…)

We loaded those into a slideshow, and here is what we all came away with:

We are posting up a sneak peek of our bride from our last wedding of the year! I loved the freedom I had with this bride! She was such a delight and being a photog herself maybe added to her ability to be so workable. Plus she was such a beauty of simplicity and poise. We are doing an after engagement shoot with them since we were booked at the last minute. So we had no time to do that. Sooo looking forward to taking the both of them out for that. More of them later…

Here is Stephanie….

Mark is working like crazy to get the rest of their wedding edited, but the cold and flu bug decided to stop in and pay us a visit so it’s been slow going this week…stay tuned!