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- Today is a BIG day (actually, it’s kind of a big weekend – for two reasons!)
Reason #1: Today is my first wedding of 2022!! It’s hard to believe it but the off-season is over & it’s time to get back into the swing of the wedding photography world! I’m SUPER pumped, it is going to be a gorgeous, amazing day – a beautiful start to my 13th year of photographing weddings.
Of course (and this is also always strange to say): even though I’ve been doing this for 13 years now, I still get super nervous – especially for the first wedding of the year! Every wedding day brings it’s own bundle of nerves (after all, my job is a HUGE responsibility & I definitely do not take it lightly!) But the first wedding of the year always brings an extra scoop of anxiety on top of the normal wedding-day-nerves. It’s going to be incredible though and I cannot wait – there will be sneak peeks on my Facebook page tonight and highlights on my blog this coming week!
Reason #2: Derrick’s parents are here this weekend and we are finally starting into some of the bigger house-projects we’ve been saving up and planning to do for a few years now!! We have a whole multi-step plan, but for this weekend, we are simply completing (or hoping to!) step 1: closing in our front “porch” and creating a new entryway/mudroom area!! Once it’s complete, we can begin shifting things in our living room around to prepare for our laundry room/first floor bathroom renovation (which will hopefully take place later this summer!)
Needless to say: there is a LOT going on – so many moving pieces this weekend! - But, let’s rewind to last weekend – last Sunday was Mother’s Day. Braelynn has been looking forward to “Mommy’s Day” for weeks now. She promised me that she would let me sleep until 7am and then bring me breakfast in bed.
Well, she made good on both of those promises! Promptly at 7am, she came upstairs, carrying a tray of goodies: a bowl of peanuts, a peeled orange, a banana, 4 vanilla wafer cookies, and a card wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day.
We had originally talked about going to Idlewild Park for the afternoon – we haven’t been there in 2 years and since we have Platinum passes at Kennywood this year, we can visit Kennywood’s “sister parks” for free. Last weekend was Idlewild’s opening weekend and we thought it would be fun to visit. Well, logistics got in the way, and we simply ended up going to Kennywood instead. It was the most beautiful day to be at an amusement park – we had such a fabulous time!
So yes, my Mother’s Day was a delightful and wonderful day. - It’s been the most beautiful week I think I ever remember. We have been outside all-day-every-day (literally, from the moment my children have woke up every morning until we drag them inside to take baths at the end of the day). Zero chance of rain, perfect 70-80º weather, it has been a pure delight. We have eaten picnics outside almost every day and Braelynn & Leander have the most glorious summer tans already going on! I’m not sure what we’re going to do when it rains tomorrow!
- Potty training update: I am SO PROUD to finally be able to claim that Leander is making great progress with potty training!! He really has seemed to get it this week! Going longer and longer stretches without accidents, starting to realize when he needs to go to the potty (by himself, without us asking him), and overall, simply being happier to go potty!! I am so relieved, I honestly think that somewhere deep down, I was worried that he would never be potty trained – but we’re making amazing progress & I am SO proud of him!!
- I still haven’t editing any of our Florida vacation video footage. I’ve editing all of the photos, but I haven’t even looked at a single video.
It’s not that I haven’t wanted to, I’m dying to begin to edit our videos from our trip! But, I needed to finish up a few other projects first, and then I realized I was having a major “space” issue with my computer. You see, I have a 4tb hard drive on my computer and I was floating down around 600gb of free space. I didn’t really think anything of it because I had a lot of random stuff stored on my desktop that needed moved off to an external hard drive, and I assumed once I did that that I would regain about 2tb of space. Well, I took some time on Tuesday (when my sister Ruby is here to babysit the kids) to clean up some of my files and attempt to open up some additional space, and I realized, even though I was cleaning things up, I really wasn’t regaining the space I thought I would. In fact, I barely got up to 1tb of free space. This sent me into a deep-dive on what is actually stored on my computer and what is taking up so much space. I discovered that “system data” was eating up 3tb of space – and I’m still trying to figure out what that is. I’ve done extensive Googling, watched so many YouTube videos, cleared caches & libraries & logs, deleted so many files and yet still, I have this “system data” taking up a huge chunk of my hard drive.
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t quite have an ending yet, because I’m still trying to figure it out. In other words, instead of editing our vacation videos, I have spent hours researching and digging through files, trying to figure this out. It’s a little bit of a nightmare. (If you are reading this and you’re a Mac-pro and can help me out, PLEASE reach out!) - Tomorrow, my sister Emma is getting married! She & Luis are eloping (in the very traditional sense of the word). No one (except the officiant) will be present – and that is 100% exactly what they want. They’ll host a small wedding reception in July to celebrate with all of us in person!
So, we threw Em a mini-bachelorette party this week. It was small – just us sisters + baby Leo, but we had a delightful time! It was super chill and laid back, we ate food, took some photos, did a painting project, and simply enjoyed each other’s company.
I can hardly believe that after tomorrow – I’ll have just two siblings left to get married! How is that even possible?! - Speaking of baby Leo – I got to take my brand new little nephew’s newborn pictures this week!! It was such a special delight. He was an absolute dream-baby to photograph – so good and sleepy and cooperative!!
