the great thing about shooting families is to be able to be witness to so much love.
i love to watch people love…all in different ways…but all so good.

and a pleasure it was watching little avalyn be loved up by her mama and papa and grandpa and grandma.

avalyn’s family joins the mission field in south america next week.

~k

tsk tsk. a week of no blogging. oh, but this is a big big post to pay for it.
and while i sit here scrounging for some creative excuse, the truth is this:
i have rediscovered the joy of hermitting comfortably within the cozy shell of our home after being away for too long. that and the fact that i arrived home from michigan at 2:30 a.m. last week, had a 7:30 photoshoot the next morning followed by a 9:00 doctor appointment and, right before that point where one literally falls to the ground and passes out, i finally exhaustively trudged home, half-conscious, to retreat to my bed where i stayed for three days…literally.

tangenting for one moment before i get too far to admit an embarressing moment at the airport.
after pushing a stroller stacked with suitcases and dangling camera bags/laptop/purses while simultaneously comforting sleepy baby front-packed to my chest through boarding pass lines/security, i ran–yes, ran–past a line of thirty-six gate entrances to reach gate 58 at the very end of the terminal at exactly fifteen minutes before plane’s supposed take-off. only to find out the gate for fort myers had been changed to gate 22…that gate from which onlookers laughed at me when i madly ran past it twenty minutes previously, zigzagging an overpacked stroller while jiggling a chest-strapped baby, spilling the hot tea that tetered from stroller’s cup holder all the way. so, i vowed not to cry but rather sped my way (zig-zagging/
spilling/jiggling) back to gate 22. oh, and p.s. during all this, i blew out a flip-flop. never understood jimmy buffet’s phrase or how he could start a legend of a song with as stupid of a line as “i blew out my flip-flop” until it happened to me. in between gate 58 and 22. i pictured a herd of fat, sweaty security guards holed up in some dirty office, eating auntie ann’s pretzels watching the footage of all this going down in uproarious laughter. in fact, i think it was them that changed the gate just for fun.
so, when i finally clip-clopped my floppy flip back to gate 22, i found an overpacked gate huddled with travelers waiting for a delayed flight. after 45 minutes, we boarded the hot plane where we sat for an additional hour-and-a-half on a detroit runway, waiting for a pilot to make his way back from milwaukee to come steer our plane. needless to say, i arrived home at 2 in the morning, managing to keep lainey sleeping while strapping her back to my chest and reassembling stroller luggage cart. stroller luggage cart that had unevenly distributed weight and flipped over in front of the elevator right before i was nearly home free.
which is where i flipped out. man comes running…”you look exhausted, ‘mam. can i help you?’
and here’s where i just kissed every shred of dignity…every portrayal of supermom…every effort of pull-it-together-ness goodbye. i hung my head in front of this nice man, in front of my toppled stroller, in front of fellow passengers making their way to the baggage claim…i hung my head and cried. just shook and whispered over and over, i’m so tired. i’m so tired. i’m so tired. and i think i may have taken the drama a step higher and threw in an i’m pregnant too. out-of-body experience…not myself and certainly nothing i’m proud of, but good moms can have breakdowns too, right? it’s kind of funny now.

so, tangent aside, we happily arrived home safe & sound and, had i not been so tired, i would have picked my bed up and slow danced with it. that’s how bad i missed it. instead, i slept hard, waking up three days later to crazy nausea and a flood of memories back to lainey’s pregnancy. we’re managing pretty well now though and, to be honest, it’s so entirely worth it that i can’t help but smile, feet a’propped on the couch, knowing all this yuk is simply the beauty of the crazy miracle of growth and evolving perfection of someone i already love so incredibly deep.

in the meantime, i crave frosty bowls of frozen blueberries dusted with sugar. cold cucumbers. crisp celery. nectarines. chamomile tea. oh, and massages. long massages.

and we got another peek at our little pea last week. the little pea with a now bigger body that gracefully danced in that warm little home…and made me smile. two ultrasounds in and lainey already recognizes the glossy black-and-white photos with the crescent-shaped cluster of lines as simply…”little baby.” several times a day, on her own, she reaches up on my desk, pulling our prized pictures down and runs them to me. “little baby,” she says, smiling. oh, it melts me.

big sigh.

catching up some more…editing, ordering and shooting more this week (if you’re waiting for an order or an image gallery, i promise it’s coming soon! i haven’t forgotten you!)…

with a few i haven’t posted yet.

a sweet brother & sister seepin’ some florida love…

oh, and i love these…just raw & beachy & kid-ish.

sweet little babes, they are.

and speakin’ of sweet little babes…

my love has astounded us today.
although i kinda knew she would.
we potty-trained her today. like, cold turkey. i just woke up and knew we were done. knew we were for some time, actually…she told us in so many ways (like changing her own diaper on several occasions…without us knowing…and doing a miraculous job to boot)…but i waited, as i often do, until i was ready to give it everything and be done with it.
so we wore our big girl unders to target this morning to buy her own little chair, went potty in it as soon as we got home, and then she took care of the rest. i never asked her once today if she had to go. didn’t have to because my determined little ran to that potty on her own every time she had to go…did her thing all by herself, wiped independently and pulled her little unders right back up and ran to play. mind you, there was a lot of jumping and clapping and squealing on my part, but her shy smile tried to humbly play it off as nothin’ much. not one accident today. not one diaper. and we’re talking real unders…not those money-making diaper knock-off pull-ups. she even took a two hour nap with her new big girl pants and woke up dry. (oh, but i did find two chicken nuggets, a lego and the largest wad of toilet paper known to mankind in her little pot tonight). i think it’s just done. and we’re so proud. expecting occasional set-backs, of course, but i had a feeling it would go like this.

the same goes with swimming as we’ve had her in the pool every day the past week and she is nearing swimming by herself. goes under, pops back up, kicks, paddles, smiles. brett wants the glory of teaching her himself as he did the boys and, while i had my doubts and wanted her swimming independently by the end of the summer, he’s well on his way to his accomplished task. shoulda known.

and amidst all this hubbub, we celebrated brett’s birthday last week…

and today, three years since that happy, happy day.

we went out tonight, and it felt so good to go out. to be out of bed, nausea free, and spend time dressing up. i love to dress up. i like picking out my shoes (or shall we say, digging through the heap of a mess in my closet for the possibility of a matching pair) and rifling through shimmers and scarlets and creamy nudes in my make-up case. i like sitting indian style on the bathroom floor with bobbypins in my mouth famously multi-tasking at rolling big curlers in my hair while flipping pages through the stack of magazines in front of me. and i actually enjoy the routine of blasting the hair dryer on my eyelids to dry my liquid liner only to q-tip it off five minutes later and start over. it’s being a girl, and i wouldn’t have it any other way.

and that’s just the precurser, of course, to a treasured evening out alone. we watched as our chef lit onion volcanos on fire on the grill in front of us at the japanese steakhouse where we enjoyed our first date almost six years ago. and i ate until my dress pulled uncomfortably on my expanding stomach, sipped jasmine tea and talked in the quiet of the room. it was perfect. nothing spectacular and yet, because of that very reason, spectacular just the same. and when he went to sign the bill right after i kissed him, i looked over to see my blood-red lipstick completely and perfectly transferred to his lips. and i laughed until i shook and black streams of liquid-liner tears rolled down my cheeks because really, there’s nothing quite so funny than celebrating three years of happiness at a romantic dinner sitting next to a dragqueen. he looked like mrs. doubtfire, and while he furiously dabbed and wiped and frustratingly worked to remove his scarlet lips i realized again, then and there, that i love him so very much.

and there you have it.
a big big post.
and there shall be more…
because there’s just lots of love goin’ around these days. and what’s some good love if it isn’t bottled up, photographed and slapped on a perfectly good blog post? (okay, so the undocumented love is just as beautiful.)
yes, there shall be more.

until then, we are enjoying the big, the small and all the itty bitty baby things. ~k