Ah, baby...

This post is just an excuse to share some more sweet pictures of baby Willow. We do a monthly photo shoot. It has the purpose of making me take tons of pretty pictures of her, but also in keeping me from spending every day of my life taking tons of pretty pictures of her. Once a month photo shoots with lots of Instagrams in between seems like a reasonable, only slightly obsessive thing to me!

Well hello there, and welcome to the new fancy schmancy blog! 

I decided when I went back to working post baby that I should make things as crazy as possible for myself and have been working on a website redesign ever since! Yay! 

Sometimes you wonder what life is going to look like when you make a big change, like oh say having a baby. I definitely did. I wondered about it constantly when I found out we were having Willow, about a year ago now. It made me anxious. I was scared I wouldn't be able to handle it all. I was scared that I'd have to make too many sacrifices, that my sadness about those sacrifices would make me feel selfish, that something between Erik and I would be lost. 

I thought it would take me weeks to edit this wedding. I seriously did. With Willow only sleeping 45 minutes at a time, the ENORMOUS number of photos I took at this gorgeous wedding, and a generally sporadic schedule this week, I just figured it would take me a little longer than normal. I was wrong. As soon as I dug into the editing for this wedding, I got completely swept up in it all over again. I'm so thankful that my first wedding in so long was such a perfect one. Though, who am I kidding? I tend to book some stellar brides and gorgeous weddings, so I'd probably be saying that no matter what. But SERIOUSLY, this one was amazing. Just wait and see.

Well, it's officially been three months since Willow was born. Baby has completely consumed my world in the best possible way. I told myself I would blog only if I felt like it for the first three months of her life and that's what I did. Now, I'm planning to get back in the habit! Let's just hope Willow learns to sleep a little more/better so that that can be accomplished! haha

Wow, it's been a long time since I blogged! It's a lot harder to blog or, well, do anything when you're on a newborn's time schedule that's for sure. And I will definitely get back to business eventually (my Fall brides just breathed a sigh of relief! haha), but am choosing to take my time and luxuriate in the awesomeness and uniqueness of a new baby for as long as I reasonably can! I have, however, been wanting to write this post because so many people have literally been asking for it and I've been promising to do it for months. So here we go!

If you read the official laws of the Interwebs, you'll know that if you are a blogger of any sort, and have a baby, you are thus required to document your birth story for the rest of the world to enjoy and/or read in horror. Well, there's no horror story here, so no worries there! But there are definitely gaps because my brain was a little distracted and also I'm convinced part of the miracle of childbirth is that your brain blocks as much of it from your memory as possible so that you'll be more inclined to go through it all again for subsequent babies!

Today is Willow's due date. Huzzah! We made it! Since she is due today, technically, I'm pretty confident she won't come until at least tomorrow haha. But I figured it was a good time to reflect on the joys of the third trimester.

Yesterday, Erik and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. Actually, we kind of celebrated it all weekend long... but in the most casual manner possible. With Willow due to arrive in three days, maybe less maybe more, I think we both had this cloud of "this is it, no more just you and me time for a loooooong time" floating around in our heads. Neither of us said anything about that, but I think we felt especially connected this weekend because of it.

Believe it or not, I've been trying to do this blog post for weeks! Mostly because everyone keeps asking me for nursery photos, but also because I just wanted to be FINISHED with all baby things well before baby arrives. Well, best laid plans? I wound up not really finishing until this week. And of course, it's been so cloudy and dreary. I kept waiting for a day when the sun would light the room up all pretty like, but that just never happened and I grew impatient haha. That's my subtle way of saying I don't think my photos do the room justice! ;) 

I should have known when I drove down a winding dirt road, surrounded by beautiful countryside for three miles, that I was driving toward something very special. I should have known when Savanna and Austin were patiently waiting for me on their front porch (and letting my desperate, pregnant self into their home to use the restroom! haha) that they were going to be some of the sweetest most welcoming people to work with. I should have known when they arrived with WEAPONS and other props that this was not going to be any ordinary photo shoot, but something REALLY fun. 

I posted on Facebook about a week ago that Charlottesville has been treating me exceptionally well lately and that is so very true! This engagement session with Melissa and Tyler has been a long, long time coming. I think it's been about a year since we booked, but Melissa and Tyler have been very busy world traveling since then! They spent months in Chile teaching English as a second language together and it was so fascinating to hear about their experiences. What an amazing thing to do together before you get married. 

You guys, I didn't blog last week! What in the what! 

Let me tell you why. 

Last week was wacky crazy nutso. 

I promised not to inundate my blog with pregnancy/baby posts, but it's become extremely difficult since pregnancy/baby things have inundated my life. You have no idea how excited I am to get some shooting in next month for some clients, if only so that I can focus on photography for a change! 

Today's blog post is for anyone in pain, especially the pregnant women out there... which seems to be approximately 43.6% of the Richmond wedding industry right now. Which is kind of hilarious and amazing. But anyway. If you read my second trimester post, you know that my back has been my biggest struggle lately. So, almost as soon as I wrote that post, I went on the war path to treat myself.

Everyone tells me the honeymoon is officially over once you enter the third trimester. It seems like others rank them in order of discomfort to be third, first, then second. For me, it's been a much more gradual, ever increasing thing. I had no major physical symptoms for the first trimester. But almost the instant that the second trimester started, I could feel things really changing in me and have been dealing with those things for the past three months.

Well, it's about time right? I've only wanted to do this project for a few years. I just kept chickening out because our bedroom was the most intimidating place to prettify for me. Mostly because of the vaulted ceilings that I just didn't know how to paint. And paint is a REQUIREMENT. I got really gun ho about finally doing it last winter when I did the master bathroom (which looks even better now than it did then, thanks to the shower door we had installed this Fall, thanks Uncle Chris!). That's when I bought the lamps and a white duvet. But that was basically as far as I got. Though I was highly ambitious on Pinterest, as all pinners are.

I had a friend text me yesterday asking for camera recommendations. Naturally, I get this question a lot. But it's a difficult question to answer because 1. there are SO many cameras out there to choose from! and 2. the camera you need is so dependent on what you plan to do with it. A lot of people tell me they just want a camera that takes great pictures! But that doesn't really narrow down the list because that's definitely already implied when you're deciding to invest in a new camera... especially nowadays when your cell phone takes reasonably good photos itself.

My master bedroom project is still in the works so unfortunately I don't have that to share with you today. And unfortunately, because my "office" space is in my master bedroom, my desktop is currently disassembled while I await my new desk's arrival. This means I don't have easy access to typical photo catalog... that's not to say I couldn't hook up my external hard drive to my laptop and boom, problem solved, but I'm using all this as an excuse to write a blog post with words. Because that used to be all I did. Back in the early days of blogging, it was never about the pictures. And it's definitely fun to revisit that sense of freedom that words give you.

Well January 2016 is going to go down as Tiffany's worst blogging month ever. It's been a weird month, that's for sure. I've been plugging away at some home projects I've had on the back burner for years that now I have decided MUST BE DONE before baby Willow arrives. I've been working on DE-stressing myself and the only way I cope with that is with tons of research and preparation haha, so I've been doing a ton of that too. 

Today's blog post was supposed to be some of my favorite portrait images from 2015, but every time I thought about writing that blog post this week I just cringed and couldn't do it. Instead, I thought I'd get real with you and tell you that blogging has been a real challenge lately. It rarely fails when I hang out with a group of photographers or wedding industry peeps, that someone tells me they enjoy my blog and admire how well I keep up with it... they just can't do it. And my response is always that it comes naturally to me. I've literally been blogging since I was in middle school, when blogging was just starting to become a thing (nope, no way I'm linking you to THAT teenage madness). So I understand why it's difficult to START blogging when you've never done it before.

Happy new year everybody! I hope you had a restful and entertaining break over the holidays! I definitely did. If you know me at all, then you know I LOVE Christmas. It's easily my favorite holiday, favorite season, favorite everything... and all this despite my distaste for cold weather! Christmas fills me up with life. I'm a big believer in that selfishness is the root of all evil... and I think the spirit of giving during Christmas really speaks to me personally. Not to say that the holidays won't bring out some people's selfishness, but hopefully those people have a three ghost run in at some point in their lives and change their ways for the better ;)

This post was HARD. Last year I was so diligent in pulling out all my favorites of every wedding as I blogged them. This year, for some dumb reason, that idea was tossed out the window. So when I realized I wanted to do a "best of" favorite wedding pictures from this year post, I had a lot of photo sorting to do! It was kind of fun, but I know that I missed a bunch of favorites as well. There were A LOT of fun moments and pretty portraits this year. You'll see, those tend to be my favorite wedding pictures. I always photograph the wedding details, but it's the people and the laughs that I consistently love the most.

This Fall I decided that if I really want to avoid drugs and unnecessary chemicals, I should probably start a natural remedy medicine cabinet. My essential oil collection is a nice start to that, but I wanted to go further. Last Spring after almost 40 hours of travel returning home from a two week trip to Europe, I developed a wicked cold/bug/something yucky, and it was Lypo-Spheric Vitamin C and homemade elderberry syrup (oh, and SLEEP!) that had me feeling fine after about 48 hours. Plus, pretty much any bottle of medicine from the drug store warns you that you shouldn't have any if you're pregnant. And I have a theory that most of the stuff they tell you you shouldn't do when you're pregnant is just stuff you shouldn't do much of normally, but nobody cares about poisoning themSELVES on a regular basis haha.