they arrived. just when i needed them…frantically arriving home from grocery shopping with a popsicle-stained girl and a spilled sippy cup in the back seat not to mention the realization of an entire bag of groceries i left at the store…the ones i needed for my stuffed green pepper soup last night.

and there they were…a little piece of home in a big, crumpled box on my front step.
our leaves.

we left the groceries in the car…let the spilled sippy cup contents seep into the upholstery a little longer…shed our popsicle-stained shirt and bee-lined for the yard where we dumped those beautiful leaves into a crispy heap. and dove feet-first.

they smelled like michigan…of rich dirt and cold morning fog…plus a few teeny tiny critters who greeted me with a michigan hello. like they knew we were from the same place.

it was lovely. thank you, my sweet jo.

and speaking of home…oh, deep breath…my home is coming to me this year. a surprise phone call from my dad yesterday that he found tickets, and in just a matter of weeks…we will celebrate here. everyone. the entire family, and my eyes teared a hundred times just thinking of it. we will gather for four days in one of dad’s houses. we will drink coffee and eat grandpa pancakes in the morning. we will watch movies and play games at night. we will sit by the light of the christmas tree and talk about all that we’ve missed. we might even have one of these nights…

swear i’m not flippin’ the birds. thought it was a cool spontaneous photo moment until i realized later those were my middle fingers, not the ring/pointers i had intended. swear. i wouldn’t do that to my dad who was taking this.

it’s going to be fabulous.

and in the meantime, there’s still a ton of photo work to do which we sandwich between loads of laundry, scraping dried oatmeal (or oma-lo, as she calls it) off her table and still, our lovely picnics in the yard…more frequent now…and more special.

having small reoccurances of morning sickness, strangely…but it’s quick and over and doesn’t phase me much. lainey stands beside me with ‘papah towah’ and hands it to me during the ordeal…and when it’s over she asks, ‘all done, mama?’ which makes me smile.

i did a small mentor session the other day for a sweet young girl who happened upon my blog through mutual acquaintances and expressed a crazy desire and passion to learn more about photography. she came along with a friend whose baby i was shooting the other day to accompany the shoot and took some great photos of her own and learned a little about editing. madisyn…it was so much fun to have you be a part of our day!

and finally…
loving lately…

cold kiwi (i indulge in two whole ones a day).
my catch-all kitchen counter finally becoming decluttered and polished tonight for the first time in weeks, perhaps months.
the winter garnet hill catalogue which is full of pure coziness.
the stack of perfectly packaged orders ready to be picked up by my front door-a reminder of what i actually have accomplished.
wearing my dish-washing gloves on my feet and chasing after her, screaming ‘i’m a crazy duck’…and uproarious laughter on both ends…especially when my big feet ripped the gloves and they fell apart leaving a trail of green rubber fingers across our tile. green rubber fingers on a floor are very funny indeed, in case you wondered.

and my very favorite as of late…waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom yet again and returning to bed to lie awake…in the dark…bored and restless and thinking of all i have to do…until suddenly, in the quiet and still of that moment…a kick. a little ‘hey, i’m awake too’…and it’s magical to suddenly be reminded that there’s two of us awake. and i just want to smile and say….well, hello there. it happens every night…and gets me every time.

oh, and mornings.

sweet messy bedheads and after-breakfast cheeks that smell like syrup. slippers and tight jammies and books read under cold covers.

friendly sunshine that sneaks its way between blinds to warm up our room…

…and blurry pictures that don’t show exactly what you like like in the morning.

sending happies…

~k

so, we go through the same ordeal every night.
she, after bath and jammies and other preparatory bedtime rituals, climbs her stool to her suitcase of books where she starts pulling out the ones she expects us to read. and by ‘ones’, i mean fourteen…first carefully selected and tediously set aside into an organized pile…until about four books in. by five, the careful selection becomes more of an animalistic three-second book shopping spree as she madly whips out as many bindings as she can muster before we stop her. and then there’s just this colossal pile of literature on the floor which, despite my love of children’s books and reading good words to my little’s sweet brain, intimidates the crap out of me.
and so we whittle, convincing her to shave down the mountain to two.

pick two, we say.
pick two, she repeats.

and although i sometimes squeeze in a third on my own (who can resist willy bear), she’s managed to accept our reasonable compromise.

because lord knows we all have our mountain of books to tackle, but sometimes picking just two is perfectly satisfying. because it’s doable.

and that’s my philosophy as of late.
because it’s november and work is aplenty. and there is a two-year-old to read fourteen books to. and a house to clean. and a husband who walked out of the bedroom tonight while i was putting lainey to bed and mumbled, ‘gross, there’s a scalloped potato stuck to the door.’ and i ignored him, pretending if i didn’t acknowledge he said it, it wouldn’t really be there. because there are doctor appointments and grocery store trips and the unraveling reality that in just a short time, there will be this tiny froggy-legged swaddled bundle of blessed sweet breath to love and hold and nurse and breathe in, and with that comes finishing a two-girl bedroom, unpacking tiny things that will need a place to stay, and goodwilling half my closet which, i swear, i can hear growling at night. it’s alive.

strangely though, i am not overwhelmed.
my goal is to have all my holiday work edited, designed and ordered by december first. which leaves me a month to clean and nest and drink in the holidays…and another month to zen myself into the beautiful place of knowing it is near. and i say that just to account for another month… because, believe me, i am so already zenned. i want her in my arms so bad, i can taste her. i have imagined a trillion times the first blink-blink of her tiny eyes as she takes in the new light and love of her world or how she will smell when i bring her head to my lips that first night we spend together…alone in our room…or just how our girl’s eyes will twinkle when she holds her little baby for the first time…and how it will feel to huddle with the warmth of one more body to make an even bigger family or feel my heart stretch to fit another little egg in my nest to protect and teach and love. yeah…zen i am.

things are getting done, and i, like my sweet little, have learned to compromise, setting aside the mountain for two. shake down the kitchen and edit two sessions. clean bathrooms and design a card. a load of laundry and e-mail three people back. play baby dolls with my girl and drink in, for a moment, the first bout of little bean’s hiccups felt. yes, two at a time. sometimes more. and i tackle them heartily, diligently and perhaps even enjoyably. i am the little-engine-that-could and me & my caboose are chuggin’ along just fine.

the caboose has grown.

and comparive tummy observations have become a weekly ritual.

cold fronts continue to knock on our door, and we gladly welcome them…
tonight with hoodies.

big fans of the hoods here in the house. i mean, big. she sometimes curls herself into a quasimodo hunch just so she can ‘hood’ herself with the back of an otherwise hood-less shirt.

oh, she has been just heaven lately. i hate that ‘mama wuhk’ has become part of her vocabulary, but at the same time i’m comforted and inspired and entirely okay with the fact that she understands work is a part of life–both as a means of survival and as a manifestation of hobbies and interests and talents and reaching for big things in life…and that she knows she is completley integrated into all of it…today following me out the door for a shoot with her own tiny camera. ‘mine came-wa’, she squeaked before she held it up, backwards and upside-down, and pretended to click away right beside me.

i wonder what she makes of it all…if she will want to take pictures as she grows up. if meeting children and babies and all these mamas and daddies will help her learn more to love people. if she will be a lightroom whiz at the ripe age of four or design a custom album for a first-grade project. if she too will someday stretch across pavement to get the perfect angle…if she will find the beauty in seeing life, loving life and attempting to capture a little bit of what makes us so entirely happy.
i wonder.

there is much to do…but we’re takin’ it by twos.
tomorrow, we will see our little bean on the screen again…relish in the joy of snapping a newbie’s pictures…hack a little more away on our pile of edits…and maybe–just maybe–find the time to scrape some scalloped potatoes off a dirty door.

…loving. ~k