The wildflowers at my local nature park are bountiful and beautiful. Fields and fields of golden yellow flowers! Aria and I picked a few and have them in a vase in our front window.

As much as I love Chicago and the snow, I'm now ready for spring to be here. I miss warm-er weather and flowers starting to poke their heads out of the ground. I always get excited when I start to see crocus shoots and buds on the tree branches. Silly I know, but it means that warmer weather is coming and Chicago winters always seem to drag on longer than they should.

So I was going through my nature photos taken this past spring/summer and have decided to put some up to bring some warm weather cheer to my blog. Enjoy.

About 2 months ago I set off to the nature park near my house armed with my camera, tripod, stroller, and daughter; to take some self portraits. The real reason was because I had found this lace maxi dress at the Unique thrift store near my house and wanted to show my sister. But the photos turned into very nice portraits of myself and my daughter so I thought I'd show them off.

She always makes these crazy faces at the perfect times for photos.

Okay, I will say that I took these photos a little under a year ago. Last October to be exact, but I have nothing new to upload so this is what I have. I didn't have this blog when I did these photos so that is why they don't already exist on the blog.

This is my cousin April and her boyfriend Tim. She just wanted some portraits of the two of them and ended up using one as a Christmas card photo. At first they were both a little shy about showing affection in public, but being the sneaky person I am, I caught a few good shots of them.

I prefer getting more candid, natural looking shots but I also took a couple more "posed" photos.





It was turning to evening as we were finishing up the photos and so I got several shots in the high grass with some lovely evening light.




And of course since we're in Chicago, and this park has a lovely hilltop, skyline view, we had to get a few of those shots in. And as luck would have it, the photos also got to feature Chicago's trademark wind.