One month.
Three museums.
One curious little girl.

Sacramento Children’s Museum
KidsZone – Truckee, CA
Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum – Reno, NV

I’ve been documenting her life A LOT these days.
There’s a good chance she might show her little face around here more often.

As a wedding and portrait photographer, this tends to be the slow time of year. I’ve been taking complete advantage of this time to work on some personal projects. It’s nice. One project consisted of taking 1 roll of film, which equates to 12 exposures for my camera, and visiting 3 different locations. You seriously have to put a lot of thought into each exposure and that’s the part I love. My mom (photographed below) asked me if it was more stressful shooting that way. To be honest, I think it’s less. It really forces you to slow down and think about each exposure. It’s almost a relaxing process. When you shoot digitally it’s easy to let yourself shoot, shoot, shoot and shoot and before you know it you’ve racked up 100-200 images – most of which you will toss anyways because you weren’t thinking. So here you have it, ALL 12 images we made, one windy Sunday afternoon.

The close of a calendar year is always bittersweet for me. This year is no different. Looking back I’ve enjoyed documenting the growth of families, the accomplishment of a young lady, and the celebration of love – both young and old. I’ve met some amazing people, many of which I look forward to seeing again over the years. Thank you to all my clients for making this year special and inviting me out to document your life.

Now let’s chat about 2012. Not toooooooo many changes with the business side of my life, but personally there are some BIG changes. For starters, this April we are expecting a new addition to our family! I’m pretty sure my daughter hasn’t fully grasped what this means quite yet, but she’s pretty excited to be a big sister. So of course this means I will be on maternity leave for most of April and all of May. If you’re planning to book a session please contact me before April. After that, openings will be very limited. I will also book a few weddings this summer, but not nearly as many as this last year. In fact, July is already booked, with only a couple of openings in June and August. Then…in September my little family of four, will be making a temporary move all the way across the country to Augusta, Georgia so my husband can finish some school. Considering I’ve lived in Nevada my entire life, I’m both excited and completely terrified about this move. In the very slim chance someone from Georgia is reading this or knows someone out there, don’t be afraid to shoot me a message. I won’t know a single soul. Eeek!

This will be my last post of the year, so I’m leaving you with my top most cherished images from this last year. Thank you all for your support. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and I wish you a happy new year!

With a busy, busy summer, it’s been a while since she’s shown her face on my blog. There’s certainly a lot to catch up on, but I’ve been making notes in my phone so I don’t forget her cute little quirks. She’s grown a few more inches and has developed quite the vocabulary. We’re still trying to teach her new signs, but now that she can talk it’s hard to remember to stay on it. She has certainly learned to pronounce the word “no” very well and with such finesse! Hmm, I wonder where she picked that up. While she tries her darndest to be defiant, she sure is quite the little helper. I can tell her to go switch the laundry and she will do everything, right down to cleaning out the lint trap. You’ll see another example of “helping” below. Her latest craze is playing pretend. She’ll pretend to sneeze just so she can hear you tell her “bletchu” – which is how she says it. Pretending to be a frog is one of my favorites, especially when she starts hopping around and yelling out “ribbit!”.

And I’m sure if you asked Ellie what her favorite part was these past few months she would say “Nana!”. My Mom now lives only 20 minutes away and it is certainly everything it’s cracked up to be. We love hanging out with “Nana” and her doggie. It’s great to see her start to build bonds with people other than Mommy and Daddy. Here are a few of the things we’ve been up to this summer.

I’ve learned that college students and parents have a lot in common. One reason being, both know all too well what it means to pull an all-nighter. Thankfully we really haven’t had any of those in a while (knock on wood). Most of the time Ellie sleeps through the entire night – hello full night of sleep, I’ve missed you! On those few occasions when she does wake up once or twice it’s still tough. Except when you pick her up out of bed and she wraps her entire body around you. Even though I’m still half asleep, my heart melts.

Her latest thing to say is “phew, stinky!”. And she’ll say it for just about anything – Garbage. Shoes. Flowers. Water! She even does this scrunch and twitch with her nose when she says it that just cracks me up. And I’ve discovered the only upside to having allergies is to hear her tell me “bletch you” when I sneeze.

As you’ll see demonstrated below, we don’t always use our hands to color with Crayons. Sometimes we use our feet! Actually, my husband showed Elliette how to do it once and now she does it on a regular basis. Oh and in case you begin to wonder what’s in the plastic containers, we caught some bugs. A mosquito-eater and a rolly polly to be exact. We tried to keep the shaking of containers down to a minimum!

There are a few other images sitting in my Holga that I didn’t get a chance to develop yet, but they will make an appearance and some point. In the meantime, feel free to gobble her up, I know I will!