Sneak Peakamus Maximus

So. . .last week I ended the week falling into a fireplace, bruising my head by banging my camera getup against my forehead and my feet were eaten alive by fire ants. Just another day in the life of a clutz. I’ll work on elaborating more on the fireplace story later. :D

I have been a busy girl this past week as I have had more photo jobs in this time than I have had in a very long time. And it has been gooooood.

So here are a few sneak peaks.

First up: BellaBee. My amazing talented friend Wendy creates all kinds of domestic goodies in her Etsy shop. Do me a favor, and check her out.Then on Saturday, I had the great privilege and pleasure of photographing an incredibly lovely wedding.

Then the next morning, Spencer and I woke up to photograph a large family that I had not photographed since before Spencer and I had started dating.

 Then my cousin Matthew and his girlfriend Megan were sweet enough to allow me to experiment on them. ;)

So, all in all, it has been a BUSY week and I will have more goodies on here in the near future.

contact me or view my online portfolio. . .

Amalgam

Good lord what a weekend. It was such a LONG weekend for being only 2 days long. Packed to the gills with fun and work and fun work. The Pirate Party was this Saturday and OH BOY was it cute and fun and HOT as hades! The humidity was enough to make a person exclaim, “I’m melting…melting away! What a world, what a world!”

Directly after that I had to rush home to finish cleaning up the house for the girl’s night that I had been planning to have BEFORE Spencer lost his job. You never realize fully how messy your house is until you know people who have never seen it before will be coming over. {{rolling eyes}} First impressions and all. I decided to make something that I thought would be easy and inexpensive. Swiss style cheese fondue. Not easy and not inexpensive. It called for Gruyere cheese, which is almost $10 for a block and Kirsch Liqueur, which they don’t sell in Georgia by the way. It took both my best friend and I to make it and I still don’t think it came out the way it was supposed to. At least it tasted okay.

Fast forward to Sunday and after the meeting at the Kingdom Hall, Spencer and I came home and crashed before going to a “Jazz on the Green” going away party for some friends of ours. Fun times considering it stormed all afternoon before the party. Undaunted, we all spread our blankets and mats on the lawn anyway and snacked and enjoyed the live singing.

Picture wise I have lots of goodies to come. I am finally almost finished editing and post processing the tea party pictures only to have to start on the Pirate pictures. {{SIGH}} Just in case you guys wouldn’t have guessed, my little man was the cutest gentleman pirate EVER!! Then I also have pictures of the jazz night to work on. YAY! On the good side, after being in Covington for two years people are finally starting to realize that I have a gift for taking pictures. I have never been one to push myself but I would mention my photographic past to people at random times. I guess because photography is one of those “hobbies” almost anyone can say they are good at, my statements didn’t hold too much water until the evidence was seen. :D

While you patiently await the above-mentioned peektures I will grace my blog with some more of the picnic pictures mentioned previously.

Now I promise I am not going to plague you with ALL of the “before and after”s but be prepared to scroll for a while with all of the pictures because after I learned some kick butt tricks from my favorite Pioneer Woman, I opened up this picture folder and went to town on them

So here we have my little man showing how truly froglike he can be to accent his lovely face painting job.Here we see why photoshop is the best thing since sliced bread. What seems to be a good picture can be made great by a few clicks of the mouse and all of a sudden you have the colors and so forth that you remember seeing and not just some blah imposter colors.
You may remember this picture from a previous post? Can you believe the difference. I feel ashamed for sending out the bbq pictures to family and friends before I got the chance to "fix" them.

Another cute as can be butterfly girl.This is the lovely artist at work on her first volunteer, JJ. As you saw, he got a frog so Liam had to follow suit.

These are the lovely hosts of the BBQ. Please ignore the colorful shirt on the gentleman below. I must admit they are a bit accentuated by the action I chose.

Turns out I still was not able to post ALL of the pictures I wanted here from the BBQ as time would not permit. More to come later, if you can stand it.

As my sister would say. . .

. . . WARNING! This is going to be a LONG post. . .but with LOTS of picture goodies.

I am FINALLY getting around to posting pictures of my trip to Savannah with Sara. Although this is not a fact to be congratulated as I just bumped it up ahead of Date Day pictures from the beginning of the year and Charleston pictures. I still haven’t gotten the rolls of FILM that I took on our date day developed yet. Procrastination, Abra is thy name.

Moving right along. . .it has been a week since Sara and I went to Savannah. It was just as it was supposed to be. Relaxing with no plans. My drive to Macon to meet up with Sara was quite eventful and HOT as hades. It took me about 2 ½ hours to make a 1 ½ hour trip and once I had almost reached my destination I got flashed by a passing motorcycler. Scarred for life, I must say.

The only plan that Sara and I had was to try to eat at Lady & Sons, Paula Dean's restaurant in Savannah. However, you have to make a reservation in person by 9:30 AM at the latest in order to even get a dinner reservation. We got there at about 12ish. Hmmmm. We ended up eating at Panera Bread. Quite a letdown by comparison. After wandering around some shops we decided to do something we had never done before. We took a guided tour bus. Wish we had decided to do this earlier because it would have been awesome to be able to do the hop on and off option to see more of the city.

We ended our tour at the city market where we got a wee bit silly. . .
Normally, this is not the kind of thing I would do, but I have learned to not care as much and, HECK you can’t spend your whole life a stick in the mud.

Being that we were in Savannah, I had to get my obligatory bag of Saltwater Taffy. On the tour we had our eyes peeled for the church that we knew had Jehovah's name on it. Once we saw it we got all excited and saw this other family get all excited too. Turns out that they were also Jehovah's Witnesses which we didn't find out for sure until we were getting off of the bus. It's so nice to meet your brothers and sisters anywhere and just talk like you are old friends. Anyway, we had taken note of the streets the church was on and went back to take pictures as you see above.

That night we had all kinds of plans…most of which we did not follow through with. We ended up going to this awesome little Italian restaurant 30 minutes before they closed. {{evil grin}} Then on to our search for a liquor store. HA! I am telling you, 10 o’clock PM is not that late, I don’t care what you think. Unfortunately liquor stores do not think the same way as I do and the search for one that was open ensued.
As the picture indicates, we found one. And since this was a “no holds barred” cheating on your eating weekend, I suggested that we must get some Krispy Kreme goodness…conveniently located across the street from the liquor store…except for the fact that we didn’t notice this and got about ¾ of a mile away before making a u-turn to get back to it. {{whoops}} I swear we weren’t drunk yet.
Sunday was beach day! Highlight of my trip and when I took most of my pictures. So we packed up and were just about ready to go get some seafood before we headed to Tybee Island when “horror of horrors” I could not find my little camera. I was calm at first. . .that is until I had searched through my suitcase…and my purse…and my bed…and Sara’s car…and my camera bag…and Sara’s purse…and Sara’s suitcase…and the ENTIRE room…TWICE!! At this point I was understandably near tears. Then as I went through the hotel room one last time I yanked at the bedspread on Sara’s bed (I had already done the same thing to my bed) and THERE IT WAS!!!
A few stops on River Street, one specialty drink, and bellyful of seafood later, we were on our way to Tybee.
I've always envied Sara her freckles. I wanted freckles so bad growing up that I used to draw them on with Mom's eyeliner/eyebrow pencils.
Sara took this shot of my hand as I was stretching laying on our newly acquired beach towels.
I absolutely LOVE this picture of Sara. Surprisingly she likes it too. I took it right after she was laughing at me over something clumsy that I did.
I have become stalkerazzi as of late taking my love of observing people one step further.
Then, !!CHEESY ALERT!! we drove off into the sunset.

Growing Up and Moving On

The Perfect form for a bellyflop

SO this was a wunderbar weekend…A friend that I have not seen in FOUR years was in town and I drove to Macon to hang with her and my seester and my little bit of a man. She had never met Liam and it took a bit of getting used to for her to see me as a mom. After all I was always just her best friend’s little sister.

Sunday was great. After I spent the night with my mommy and daddy I drove back home to go to the meeting and then hang out with the COOLEST couple in the world.

They are expecting a little girl in October and I swear, she is one of the cutest pregnant people I have EVER seen. Isabella Mila Vazquez is what they are naming their daughter. What an awesome name. They tried to mix the Cuban and Russian/Polish heritage in her name. I LOVE it. Anyway, we hung out in the pool and grilled out and then I pampered Jenny by giving her a footrub and painting her toenails because I remember how hard it was for me to reach my own toes after a certain point.

I think one of the best parts of the weekend was how my little man was able to finally conquer his fear of the water in one fell swoop. It was gradual at first, but then, yesterday it all changed. He was jumping in OVER AND OVER again. . .

. . .and asking to be thrown back and forth between people until we were all too tired to continue doing it.

It was mind boggling how this little person who, just 3 weeks ago, was screaming bloody murder if you even suggested going under water with him was now willingly putting himself face first in the water. I’m tearing up just thinking about it. Since the first and last time Liam ever went to the beach was when he was 1½ years old, Spencer and I have decided we are going to take a weekend towards the middle of July to go to the beach with him. This will be nice for him especially after overcoming his fears in the pool. The only bittersweet part of his conquest is that Grandpa and GrandNettie have FINALLY got a contract on their house and will have to be out of it by July 2nd which means no more ready access to the pool. It makes me SO flipping sad that this house I have come to love will no longer be a Morris house. I am happy beyond words that it is being sold because my lovely in-laws are simplifying their lives to better serve Jehovah but even the sweetest cup we put to our mouths in life usually is accompanied by a few bitter tears.