This is Aly, who is not only gorgeous but super sweet and smart as well! She's also an active part of her high school community as a Huskette and a member of the award-winning North High School Green Brigade Color Guard. Aly, you were a joy to photograph!

The sunflowers are awfully sad looking. My girls are pretty though. ;)

We ended the day with the same amount of fingers we woke up with, so I'd say it was a successful Fourth of July. Happy Birthday, America!

Sometimes I just can't with how much I love these kids. We've been to hell and back together and these feelings run deep.

When you're a shiny new parent, somewhere around 48 to 72 hours in you realize that maybe it's not what you thought it'd be. The baby cries a lot. It's hard to nurse.  You're super emotional. You just want to sleep. It gets hard. Not like hard but really really hard.

Those first years test both your marriage and your sanity. Sometimes, they both fail you. Sometimes you fail them.

These years are a blur of messiness and tears and vomit now. Eventually, your kids become more independent and one day, you sleep in. Your kids pour their own bowls of cereal and quietly entertain themselves so you can sleep. It's magical, people.

Mamas in the midst of that early-years chaos, I promise it gets easier. I promise that one day soon, they'll sleep through the night. They will learn to wipe their bottoms on their own and put on their own bandaids and work the remote themselves. It gets easier.

I know we're not the only ones.

It's raining and these knuckleheads haven't earned enough screen time to let the devices babysit (joking) (or am I?) so they made slime. Not apologizing for the messy house or the fact that they are still in pajamas after lunch because honestly, that's what this day- and a lot of our days- looks like.

These lazy summer days are the bees knees. The absolute best. Yesterday, I didn't even take a shower until 5 pm. It's the end of June, no one has to be up early and I'M JUST NOT SORRY, GUYS.

This morning, Tyson wanted to pretend that the storm knocked the electricity out (it didn't) so he turned all the lights off. Then everyone crawled into my bed and we had a rainy day snuggle party. I'm telling you, guys, we are living our best life right now.

It's been a while.

Other than on my personal social media, I've been quiet. No blogs. Not a lot of pictures, other than of my own family. We’ve weathered a lot of changes over the last several years and I’ve taken a lot of time to love on my babies, refocus on my marriage and really just live.

To breathe.

But...

I missed taking pictures, and I really missed writing. A lot. More than I realized, in fact.

Then, this spring, my husband bought me new equipment. I've been working with this new camera and falling in love all over again. He and I have also talked a lot about what I’d like to do with this shiny new tool. Before I started my photography business in 2011, I spent a lot of time blogging. I wrote about my kids, parenting, marriage, and I enjoyed the connections I made through that medium. It’s something I loved and miss.

I also really really love capturing moments like this one for your families; these frozen moments in time feel so messy, chaotic and hectic to you at the time (especially with small kids) but are truly some of the most treasured of all family heirlooms. Candid out-takes, those seconds in between the smiling poses where everyone is comfortable and being themselves... those seconds when you can breathe.

In a nutshell, that's lifestyle photography. And this is my new lifestyle photography blog. This is where my two passions intersect to (hopefully) create something special.

I‘m actively booking sessions again and I’m going to share them (along with lots of other stuff) here.

This is about life - yours and mine - and photography. It's about remembering what real life looked like years from now because we have a tendency to forget its messiness when we look at our perfectly polished studio-made family portraits. It's playful and spontaneous and doesn’t always smile. It's dirty faces and freckles and skinned knees. It's belly laughs, but it’s not always happy, because sometimes life’s a real shit show. This is real life.

I want to capture your real life on camera. Contact me to to schedule your session. Click “let’s chat” to reach out.