A smile

I know that if we couldn't have children then I would have been enough for my husband. I know he loves me more than anything else in the whole wide world... nearly... except for Thomas (who he loves in a *different* way he tells me). No-one makes him smile like Thomas does, it makes my heart smile :)

Back then it was just pure love, nearly two years later they are proper pals...

This is my post for The Gallery this week - topic "A Smile". Head over to Tara at Sticky Fingers to see all of the other fabulous photos. Guaranteed to make you smile!!

Manual take two!

I didn't take part in The Gallery this week. I just didn't have time. Today Thomas is sleeping for a loooong time so I thought I'd update on my 'switch to manual' leap, which was dramatically helped by Jay. Thanks Jay :)

It's kind of good and bad. The worst photos are the ones which I know would have been brilliant if I'd got the focus right / ISO right / aperture right (delete as appropriate):

Ones which I'm mainly happy with, but still don't *quite* get what I did to get the photo:

Then the ones which really make me happy :)

I think it's a coincidence they're both black & white! I love the last one - my boys were drumming, singing songs... at this point, Thomas was screaming at the crocodile in Row Row Row Your Boat. It may not be technically brilliant, but it captured the moment perfectly.

Schooldays!

I wasn’t going to take part in The Gallery this week… Thomas is almost two so I don’t even want to think about his first day at school. I know it will be here in a second and I want to savour the next couple of years before he completely leaves me!

Then I remembered that on a recent visit home I had found this:

It’s a collage of photos from my last days at secondary school; we all said our goodbyes and went on to whatever came next. We all grew up and we all moved on. I stayed friends with a couple of people and found out about other people through them, so we all stayed interconnected but far apart until a couple of years ago...

Suddenly, Facebook made the whole school year accessible again! I wasn’t sure whether this would be a good thing but it’s turned out OK.

There are people I don’t want to be friends with, so I’m not. There are people who I’m not friends with, but who I can now look at as an adult and feel happy that they’re doing well. Then there are my friends, who will always be my friends, who I would keep in touch with anyway, but who I keep in touch with more because of Facebook. Some got married, some went travelling, some had babies, some have brilliant careers, some people really changed, and others have stayed the same. So much has happened to us all since these photos were taken, yet school will always tie me to these people, and I feel glad that Facebook has reunited me with most of them :)

(not the bare-chested boy who was my boyfriend at the time!)