Lunch in Newport!

My best friend lost her nana, unexpectedly, and she was really like my nana too. She was a nana to everyone she met. Last week started with an 18 hour trip to AZ to celebrate nana’s life and give my best friend a big hug.

I’ve always been a photographer, even before I knew I wanted to be a photographer. I bought a Canon point and shoot when I was 12. I remember going to Best Buy with my mom and buying that camera. It was $200 at the time and I remember saving for so long. And I even had a little extra cash to buy a case and a 2 gb memory card. I brought that camera everywhere and I still have it and it still works! I took photos of everything, pretty much all candid. And I’m also pretty sure I annoyed the hell out of everyone. But, when I heard the news about nana, I remembered that I had some photos of her somewhere. I have so many photos from high school but I know that’s I’ve lost some in transfers from memory cards and new computers since then. But I really felt that I had a few that had to be on our current hard drive. I searched and searched but no luck. It wasn’t until we got home from our quick trip that I had a feeling I knew exactly where to find them. With Michael’s help (and I really believe, Nana’s help, as well) we found some old pictures within a few minutes. It’s had me reflecting all week about how important photographs really are and what a privilege this career is. I feeling extremely honored and blessed to be able to photograph life’s biggest moments but also the in between ones that maybe don’t seem as big. Weddings, motherhood, couples in love in places that are meaningful to them. It’s all meaningful to me, and Michael of course, being my righthand man.

On an unrelated note, I wanted to make a bigger effort in sticking to a food budget. I shared in our stories that we are extremely consistent in what we spend on food, without even tracking it. Regardless of whether we eat out three days in a week or zero times in a week, the number is always within a few dollars. But I know that with a bigger effort in tracking and planning, I can get that number down. So this week, I planned the meals for a week, wrote out everything I would need for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and then kept the receipts while also writing the totals down in my notebook. Michael’s dad stayed with us this weekend and treated us to a really wonderful lunch on Saturday. So I can’t say for sure that we would have stayed to the weekly allotment otherwise, but this week was a success!!

A gorgeous motherhood session on Friday and guests at a wedding on Saturday; a rarity these days but so fun! Wrapped up the weekend celebrating Cinco de Mayo with some good friends visiting from DC (we also happened to photograph their engagements).

If you’ve been following along on Instagram stories, I’ll be celebrating my birthday all month long with some exciting announcements, giveaways, and new resources to better serve all of you! So stay tuned because you won’t want to miss it!