Wow was April ever a crazy month! Surprisingly the busyness was less photography related and was regular run-of-the-mill life happenings. In between shooting and editing we had Easter, visiting family, travel, and making sure to be with my grandfather through his shoulder replacement surgery.

Just before Easter I had the opportunity to meet, and shoot, the extended family of a couple of friends of ours. Some of my favorites were of Jacob & Tyler, two little boys who weren’t too sure of the camera at first but got a little more comfortable as the morning went on.

The goal of this session was to get photos of the kids with their cousin Benjamin so they would have a nice mothers day gift for their grandmother. I have been photographing Benjamin since before he was born when I did his mothers maternity photos. He has been featured here on the blog in the past. It’s not easy to get photos of three little boys, but we definitely got some funny ones!

A couple weeks after this shoot, I headed down to North Huntingdon to meet Leslie and Rich who are expecting their first, a little boy named Lucas, any day now. Rich is from this area, but he and Leslie had been living in South Carolina until she found out she was expecting and they headed back to Pittsburgh so they could be near their families. They both seem so excited to meet their little boy!

Also in April was the first birthday of our niece, Alexa, and nephew, Evan. I am working on their one-year photos right now, I can’t wait to blog them! I love those babies so much, they are definitely a real blessing to the family.

This past weekend I stopped into my friend Mandy’s house to finally get to meet her baby girl Kayley, who is closing in on 4 months old now. I took Mandy’s maternity photos back in the fall, but things got so chaotic when Kayley was born that we just couldn’t seem to get together  until recently.

I was so glad to finally get to meet Kayley, she is such a little sweetheart! She was constantly smiling, and she didn’t so much as whine until it was time for her to eat, such a happy little baby. Not only was she unbelievably sweet but she has the most gorgeous red hair I have ever seen on a child.  It’s so soft, wild and curly that it makes her look like she has an actual hair style, I love it!

The entire time we were taking photos, Mandy and Matt’s dog Matty was begging to come in the room, she thinks Kayley is her baby and she was very concerned that she couldn’t be in the room with her. After she came in and investigated everything, she posed for a portrait of her own. She is a very friendly boxer/mastiff mix and you can tell that she’s going to protect Kayley for as long as she lives. That is her baby as far as she is concerned! The feeling is mutual, Kayley just adores her in return, and it’s so wonderful to see her learning so young how to love animals.

It’s so hard for me to believe that it’s been almost a year since I met our niece and nephew, Alexa & Evan, time sure does fly! I stopped by my in-laws house the other day to take advantage of some unusually beautiful weather we have been having here in Pittsburgh, and get some shots of them in their Easter outfits. Just as before, Evan didn’t seem all that excited about having his photo taken, but he did a lot better than in past shoots. We even got a couple smiles here and there! And as usual, Alexa was a total ham for the camera. as soon as we go outside she was sitting up straight and grinning. She may just be a little model someday!

What a busy couple weeks it has been! Between spending time with family and keeping up on housework, I’ve hardly had time to look at photos! I did finally get this batch of our niece and nephew finished up.

I took these a few weeks ago, right after Evan & Alexa turned 9 months old. This was actually our second attempt at using the washbin, but the babies just weren’t ready at 6 months, so we saved it for this milestone shoot. I’m so glad we waited, they are sitting up on their own and it made for much more natural looking photos.

Evan doesn’t enjoy having his photo taken quite as much as Alexa, he is just too busy to sit still for that long! Alexa, on the other hand, is a total ham, she loves the camera.

Meet Benjamin! He just turned three months old, and this was our second session together, third if you count the maternity session with his parents back in September. I am always surprised by how alert some babies are, and Benjamin was no exception. He spent the entire shoot smiling and interacting with myself and his parents.

I would like to take this opportunity to expand on my “About Me” section with a post introducing my little family.

First is myself and my husband Alan. We have been together since we were in high school, back in 1999. Despite living in Nashville, TN at the time, we were married in August of 2006 surrounded by family and friends in our hometown of Edinboro, PA.

Anyone who knows me, knows that the one thing that has always seemed in short supply in my life was confidence. Alan is one of those people that will tell me I’m crazy, and list off twenty reasons he thinks I’m awesome. I still have days where I feel like I can’t seem to get anything right, but he always shows up with a hug and a smile (and oh what a smile!) and helps me figure out a solution.

We are both crazy about animals, and I am really lucky to have found a guy who not only loves the animals as much as I do but isn’t afraid to clean up the messes. We talk at length about the future, and have names for all the pets we are yet to have!

It’s no surprise, considering how similar we are, that we also share a passion for music. Any time we go on a car trip together, my favorite part is getting to share several hours of rock and roll (and even some silly stuff) with my other half.

Benjamin is the oldest of our brood, and is currently almost twelve years old. We adopted him in 2001 when he was just a kitten from the Erie County Humane Society, and he and Alan have been best friends ever since.

Benjamin spent many years as only one of two cats, and he liked it that way. Our other cat, Miss Kitty, was an introvert, and didn’t socialize with strangers, Benjamin was always showered with love from any visitors to our home. Needless to say, he didn’t take it well when shortly after Miss Kitty passed away  our family began to quickly expand. As he’s getting older, he is also becoming quite introverted, and new visitors to our home rarely see him.

Harvey was added to our family in 2008 when Alan decided he wanted a lizard. Originally he wanted a “lizard with sticky feet” but somewhere his focus changed, and he started looking for a Bearded Dragon. I was all for adding a beardie to our family, Alan’s dad had a pair and I loved them. After lots of phone calls and emails, we finally found a family who was looking to rehome their 18 month old male named Houston. I still remember watching him sleep in his carrier in the back seat as we drove an hour back home to home the night we brought him home.

I had no idea just how hard I would fall in love with a lizard. A lizard! It’s true though, Harvey is the love of my life (other than my husband of course) and it’s not really a secret that the lizard that my husband wanted so badly became mine very quickly. Very often, when I am in my office processing photos, Harvey is right here with me sleeping on his little pillow behind the desk.

Lucy came into our family just a few months after we brought Harvey home. In between Harvey and Lucy’s arrivals, we lost a dear member of our family, Miss Kitty, just before Christmas. Miss Kitty had essentially been my cat, I adopted her before Alan and I ever lived together, and she was with me for every major event in my life, and losing her at the far-too-young age of six was devastating to me. With Christmas being right around the corner, and me being so heartbroken, it seemed like a good idea to adopt another cat. I remember the night we went looking at cats and kittens, saying a silent prayer to my Miss Kitty, asking her to show me which cat needed me the most. We held tons of cats, but right as I picked up Lucy, she sneezed in my face. Miss Kitty had suffered from respiratory issues most of her life, and sneezing was her trademark. I knew that this was the one we were going to take home.

However, Lucy and I got off to a rough start. I was still sad from losing my baby, and she was a typical wild kitten. She was all claws, teeth, energy and mischievousness. I remember thinking to myself “Why on earth did I get this cat, she doesn’t need me at all!!!!” It took about 6 months before Lucy calmed down, and it became crystal clear that she never needed me at all. I needed her. All of the chaos she brought into our lives forced me to put aside my grief to be angry at this impossible kitten. One day I woke up and realized I wasn’t all that sad any more and I had this amazing and sweet cat to love.

Today Lucy is still just as sweet, far less bad, but very very neurotic. She was always skiddish, but it didn’t become obvious until she got a little older just how terrified she was of the most mundane things. You can’t make toast if Lucy is in the room, it terrifies her, and just the sight of the vacuum causes her to disappear for hours at a time.

Floyd was added to our family at the end of 2009, shortly after we moved back to Pennsylvania. He is the complete polar opposite from Harvey. I always joke to people and say that Harvey is a Cat Stevens fan and Floyd listens to Black Sabbath. They are night and day, and not surprisingly, despite being a gift from Alan to me, Floyd quickly became Alan’s lizard.

He is the most amazing orange color, and he has a really interesting face due to poor husbandry at the pet store. We both still think he’s handsome, but we really don’t see him as often as we do Harvey. He is a lot more aloof and doesn’t usually want to be held or to cuddle in your lap. If he’s out of his cage, he is zooming around, hardly stopping to breath.

You know how you come across that family that has two beautiful children, and one really unruly one, and find out that the third one was completely unplanned? Well not only was Alan that child, but so was Ford. I never intended to have a third cat, we just sort of ended up with him accidentally.

Accident is actually too strong a word, I knew what I was doing when I put him in that cat carrier in tossed him in my car for a 2 hour drive from Edinboro back to Pittsburgh. Ford was just a few months old, and he was going to die. I had to do something, I couldn’t leave him where he was, especially not with winter rapidly approaching. The plan was to bring him home and rehabilitate him, and find him a loving home. He was such an incredibly sad kitten, so small with huge buggy eyes, could barely purr (but he’d try so hard!) and didn’t even seem to know how to play with toys.

Several hundred dollars later, we discovered he wasn’t just sick, he was very sick, with a broken leg, abscesses, parasites and ear mites. The money wouldn’t have bothered me, but I knew he was ours before we spent it, because Alan had named him. Alan, the one who said no more animals, named him Ford Prefect after the character in the Hitchhikers Guide series.

Ford is very similar to how Lucy was when she was a kitten, except that he’s fearless, and not calming down. He’ll be two in June, and he isn’t slowing down at all. He is the unruly, unplanned, third child, but God help us we love him. He can make us insane, and in the very next move make us laugh so hard we cry. He’s a special soul and I think he knows how lucky he is to be alive, and he takes advantage of every single day of his life. I suppose we could learn a lot from that.

I’m working on getting this blog up and running. It might be a couple days but I am super excited about it!

A million thanks to Mandi at Proper Dog Media for taking my vision and turning it into an honest-to-goodness website! I don’t know what I would do without her.