Bethany F Photography: A fun trip down memory lane... :)

I'm a sentimental person. I love memories. I think that's why I love pictures SO MUCH. They help you remember. Music is another thing that "takes me back". Man, I can hear one song and feel the feeling I felt back when that song was popular on the radio, or I can smell a room I was in when I danced to that song or sang along to it. Or I feel like I can feel the sun that was beaming in that summer memory when I listened to "that" song on the radio. Music is so powerful.

Lately I've been up until the wee hours every evening editing. Pandora Radio has been my best friend! My favorite station I created right now is from typing in "Fields of Gold" by Sting. Oh, the memories! :) That song will always make me think of the summer I swang on this cable swing my dad built us and I stared out at this golden field off in the view from our house. I would swing and swing and sing that song.

Pandora Radio has actually brought me to tears this week! Especially hearing Bruce Springsteen's voice! I know, I sound like a total dork right now, and I'm just killing some of you, but oh, when I hear his voice I just melt into my memories. :) Oh Bruce, what a voice you have! It immediately takes me back to my favorite vacation as a child. All of our family traveled to Nebraska to visit our extended family and while we were out there we saw Wyoming & South Dakota... buffalo, bad lands, national parks/monuments, my little walkman with 80's music, learning to play canasta with my grandma and cousins, eating a buffalo burger, feeding the prarie dogs, listening to my Aunt Bonnie whistle like a bird (she's amazing)... so I pulled out my photo albums tonight and found so many of these memories. Here are a bunch... a bunch of low quality images. :) But we don't care for now!

Here's that vacation to Nebraska... my family in front of one of the cabins our families stayed in. I'm not in the picture because I was taking the picture. :) I loved taking pictures when I was 7! Always have.
Here's a pro (Grandma) teaching me how to play Canasta. If you ever want to play a hand with me I'd love to... kick your fanny! Oh, by the way, I'm extremely competitive. ;)

Here's me, on the far right in Kindergarten with my friends... that picture fit my personality perfectly. Ham.

I love this picture... it's our old mailboxes when I was growing up... we lived on a beautiful piece of property and I was blessed to grow up with my cousins just down the road from us!

Here we are back in 2002... these sweet people make up a huge part of my childhood. (My brothers are the ones with brown hair and my cousins are the ones with blond hair.)

All of this Pandora Radio business really mostly takes me back to the days of playing out in the front yards of our houses with my cousins. We always had a radio on! Even outside. I just emailed my cousin Chelsi tonight to tell her how I've been thinking about her lately and all the fun times of dancing to music, and goofing off as kids we had. They always had these frozen Little Debbie chocolate rolls in their chest freezer in the garage. I'm not a big fan of chocolate, but for some reason those things tasted so good. Here's Chelsi on the road we grew up on.

And here's me being my typical self...

Here's Chelsi, Sasha and me one winter when we hiked in the snow behind our house... we always got tons of snow. One winter my Uncle Tim built a small igloo and we girls slept in it for half the night.

This picture I have to throw in here, because it's just so funny. So one winter in high school the heater went out in my car. It was awful. You can see I made do... sweater, jacket, scarf, gloves... I'm surprised I wasn't wearing a hat in this picture.

My friend Hayley and I being silly... this was taken during my photography class senior year.

This picture was taken during photography class too of me and my friends being "creative". I actually developed this one in the dark room.

Speaking of competitive... I loved to run the 400m dash in high school! I ran it at state every year!

And finally, one more significant picture. One winter we went to Mexico for Christmas and Josh got to come along with us. Lots of canasta card playing. It was a lot of fun until Josh beat me for the very first time at canasta! We had played for a couple years and he'd never beat me, and then that dreaded day came... and I didn't want to play anymore after that! Ha, ha. Ok, onto the significance of this picture. Are you ready? It's one of the ONLY pictures ever where it shows that it is possible for me to get a tan.