So for all you moms and moms-to be, here’s a little reminder to take an extra second today to enjoy whatever phase of life your kiddos are in at the moment!  

Here is one of my favorites from Carson’s most recent session!

In related news, Corey has officially left his engineering  job to work in the studio full time, FOR ME!!! (Insert villian laugh here, MUAWHAAAHAAAA!). Actually, he’s probably more the boss around here than me, but since my name is on the door I feel like I kind of have the upper hand. Anyway, don’t be surprised to see him around if you come by the studio or hear him on the other end of the phone.

Welcome aboard Alyssa Jul Photography Babe, I can”t wait for the next 5 years!

Firstly, we’ve teamed up with Monique Altson of Altson Landscaping – a  rockstar landscape designer here in Tigard who’s busy putting together a plan to turn our back yard into my own little photo park. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a location right here at the studio for outdoor shooting – it’s gonna be rad! I just wish this rain would stop so we can finally get strated on the implementation phase!

Secondly, I just got a sweet new macro lens (a lens for really close up pictures). I’ve been having a blast with it and decided to get some shots of the most recent plans that Monique brought over. Enjoy!

Corey and I had put a fair amount of planning into what we wanted the birth of our first son to be like (low intervention, non-medicated, dim lights, soft music, etc.). Let’s just say that Carson heard our plans and laughed in our faces. By 9am on Monday morning my contractions were around 4 minutes apart, I was a little hesitant to drive to the hospital as I had already had two false alarms the week prior but I figured I’d be better safe than sorry. My mom was visiting from Wyoming and drove me up to St. Vincents and Corey met us there after a quick departure from work. The evaluation nurses hooked me up to the monitors and checked me out and when they announced that I was really truly in labor I was so relieved I almost squealed. I don’t think I could have stood to be pregnant any longer. Somehow going passed my due date felt like someone was playing a very cruel prank on me.

We headed back to labor and delivery room 327 and set up shop. I put on my comfy clothes, hooked up the iPod to the docking station and started what would turn out to be the longest 2 days of my life. It took no less than 3 people pressing on various spots on my back during contractions to combat my “back labor.”  My baby was head down at least, but was facing the wrong direction and the back of his noggin was wrecking havoc on my tailbone.

For all of you non-moms out there, the magic number in childbirth is 10cm (that’s how big the opening needs to be before they let you try and push out your baby).  Each contraction slowly gets you closer to 10cm and closer to being able to push. It took me 8 tough hours just to get to 5cm, and by that time I had to try something different. One cool thing about St. V’s is that they have a jacuzzi specifically designed for women to labor in and I decided to give it a shot. I spent a good 2 or 3 hours in the jacuzzi (which actually helped with my back labor quite a bit) eating orange popsicles and laboring away. In most cases women go from 5 to 10cm much more quickly than 0-5cm, so when I got out of the tub I was totally imagining that it was almost time to push…Boy was I wrong. My midwife informed me that I had only progressed 1cm further over the past 3 hours, not what I wanted to hear.

I was disheartened, but determined. My amazing team of helpers just became that much more encouraging and I plodded onward…and onward….and onward. By 4am (another 7 hours later) in the morning I still hadn’t even gotten to 9cm and I hadn’t slept in nearly 30 hours. I don’t really know how to describe the pain of contractions, especially ones that come right after eachother without any break, but suffice it to say that it hurt worse that anything I’d ever felt. I was so exhausted and I wanted so badly to be done that I was losing my focus and unable to control my breathing. I tried every single labor position that had ever been dreamed up, and even went back into the jacuzzi for a while. Nothing helped, still 9cm. At 630am I very gratefully let the anesthesiologist poke a big needle into my back and numb me from the shoulder blades down. I went into labor knowing that I wanted nothing to do with an epidural, but once I was numb it was one of the most relieving feelings I’ve experienced.

After 5 more hours of no progress I was scheduled for a C-section, the very last thing I wanted. I was so exausted at this point that I didn’t really have the energy to be angry or sad and I quickly accepted the fact that it was going to take surgery to get this boy out of me. Corey put on his scrubs and as they began to wheel me out of the  room I was informed that one of the women down the hall from me had a much greater emergency than me and her C-section had to happen first, I was going to have to wait. After a very long  hour they came back to take me down to the OR. Before leaving though, they decided to check me one last time just in case I had dialated that final cm… and I had. It was a little overwhelming to hear that it was time to start pushing after having already resigned myself to surgery and the roller coaster of emotion I was on almost made me wish I could just have the C-section and be done. But, just as I had for the last 32 hours, I decided to suck it up and give it my best shot. I pushed for 4 hours before they decided he was positioned too crooked to come out naturally. That’s when they brought out the vacuum. They put the little suction cup on his head and tried to help pull him out but it wasn’t meant to be. The doctor decided the risk of him getting stuck was just too great and so they put the vacumm away and put me back on the schedule for a C-section.

At 4:12 pm on Tuesday, 32 hours after checking into the hospital – Carson was delivered via Cesarean section. We spent the next 3 days at the hospital with doctors coming in every hour to give me pain meds, check my incision, or check Carson’s vitals. We finally got to come home last Friday and being in my own house never felt better.  It was the longest and most trying week of my life. But  it was worth it.

I had to bring Corey along to help, because I can’t get Waylon into the back of the car alone in my pregnant state. We made the drive down to Wilsonville to our vet and piled into the the tiny exam room at the clinic. We decided to do his yearly check-up and shots to save another trip and it took Corey, and two of the staff to hold Waylon down to take his temp, give him his shots, and check his ears. I’m not sure what we did to him to make him so terrified random medical devices, but he was having none of it. It was pretty funny to have 4 adults smashed into this tiny room trying to control a man-sized dog that wanted nothing more than to run for the hills.

The doggy doctor felt around on his hurt leg and went over the X-rays with us. I sat in the corner of the room sobbing uncontrollably as the news came down that we could either give him pain medication until he can’t walk anymore or do knee surgery that only has a 50% chance of working. Apparently he tore a tendon or two, the dog equivalent of ripping through your ACL. Even worse, she said that the way his knees have grown, that it’s probably going to happen to his other hind leg as well. Let me tell you, the tears were flowing! Being 8 1/2 months pregnant didn’t help my emotional state at all, and I couldn’t help but think about the little boy I’d be responsible for soon. How can I be in charge of an entire person when I can’t even keep my dog healthy!?!

We always said we’d never pay for pet surgery, especially one that would cost roughly 5 times as much as we paid for him in the first place… I realize it’s a strange thing to love a dog like a part of my family, but I do. I think we may just have to bite the financial bullet, put him under the knife, and hope for the best. He’s gonna have to wait  a couple months though, I don’t think we can handle a brand new baby boy and a 120 pound dog recovering from surgery at the same time!

These were my projects:

1)    Sewing the bottoms on the dining room curtains…IKEA, I love you but why do your curtains come 75,000  inches longer than the window? 

2)    Make a sock monkey for Shooter.   For those of you who don’t know,  I refer to my unborn baby as Shooter as we have yet to pick a name. Since he was at over half of my weddings last year I felt it fitting.

3)    Sew a little tie onto a onesie for Shooter to attend Uncle Josh and Aunt Amy’s wedding in April.   I gave it a shot but this project is still in the works, and could very possibly end in Shooter not having a onesie with a tie on it for the wedding.  Lets just say not all projects seen on Etsy can be duplicated!

So here I am about 4 weeks later and my dining room curtains are finally looking  like they should instead of the bottoms hanging in a huge pile at the floor collecting dust and dog hair. Shooters sock monkey is complete and has a charm to it that’s a little hard to explain (I posted a picture below so see for yourself). I am sure Martha Stewart and/or the original sock monkey creator would gasp at the crudeness of my sewing skills and any or all of the monkey’s appendages I so painstakingly sewed on will probably come off the first time he’s played with, but I did it!  I sewed my son a stuffed monkey out of a pair of socks!   Mr. Monkey is currently and patiently awaiting Shooter’s arrival on his bookshelf along with a pair of  super cute converse from his daddy! I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board for the onesie/tie project, but if all else fails, Corey said he’d draw a tie on with permenant marker

I know it’s a little fuzzy, but it’s a picture of a picture that I took with my phone, so cut me some slack. More updates to follow!

Last week in between editing sessions, I went out on a limb and decided to give Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookies a shot, they had to be better than eating another zucchini salad… right?

The dough was quite a bit wetter than I had imagined it would be, I suppose that’s due to all the water in the zucchini. I even added some extra flour. When I pulled them out of the oven I was a little disheartened to see that they looked absolutely nothing like real chocolate chip cookies and more like pasty dough balls with green chunks in them. I think my expectations were a little bit too high.

I nervously bit into the first one that I scraped off the tray… it was anti-climactic. They weren’t bad, but  nothing to write home about. I really wanted to love them… and I think I could actually endorse them if I found a way to make them a little less bread like, and a little more cookie like (the extra flour probably didn’t help that cause).  I’m not going to give up though, and luckily I’ve got an abundance of the main ingredient. I took a few photos of the process, and I’ve pasted the recipe below. Let me know if you’ve got some advice, or a zucchini recipe that you like!

1/2 cup butter

3/4 cup sugar

1 egg

1/2 tsp. vanilla

1 1/2 cup grated zucchini

1 1/2 cup flour

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1 cup quick oats

1 cup granola

2 cup choc. chips

cream the butter and sugar, stir in egg and zucchini, add dry ingredients, drop onto cookie sheet. bake 13-15 minutes at 350.

In the months that followed, I felt like Dane Sanders’ name was everywhere. Have you ever been on the verge of buying something new and then magically started to notice that new thing  EVERYWHERE? That’s kinda what happened to me with Dane. I finally checked out the guy’s website and read some book reviews,  and soon caved  in and bought his book just to see what all of the fuss was about…. I flew through the book in two days, and lets just say the fuss was very well warranted. Dane’s writing blew any preconcieved notions I had of  it out of the water. Yes, it was a book about photography (sort of), but it was far from typical. In stead of tech talk, posing, and lighting tips he focused on attitude, self image, community, branding, and our photo industry as a whole. Trying to describe it to you won’t do Dane justice, but it suffices to say that I put the book down with a far different (and much better) attitude and a brand new motivation.

Fast forward a month or two… I heard through the grapevine the Dane was travelling the country speaking and giving workshops, and yes, he’d be coming to Portland. Photography workshops (especially good ones) are not cheap, and since I had already blown through my workshop/schooling budget for the year I quickly became depressed at the thought of missing out on the chance to learn from this man who had had taken on a celebrity-like status in my head.  Long story a little shorter, once Corey had read the book too, we threw our workshop budget out the window and I signed up up for Dane’s two day workshop, chalking it up to an investment opportunity we couldn’t pass up (and we were right).  In the week before the workshop, so many people had signed up that the original workshop location was too small. I called up Sara (another great Oregon photographer and the workshop coordinator) and offered my studio as a back up, back up location. In a crazy turn of events, she took me up on it. In a few short months I had gone from never hearing Dane Sanders’ name, to buying his book, to idolizing him, to having him come to my house for his workshop. Whoa!

The workshop was nothing like I expected, yet everything I had hoped for at the same time. With 15 or so folks piled into my little studio, Dane took us from a group of competing strangers to a close knit group of new friends. We even had an engagement photo shoot (with 15 photographers!) in my “under-construction” back yard! I’d venture to say that Dane’s workshop was one of, if not the most valuable one I’ve attended. So, if you’re a photographer and you’re reading this trying to decide if the Fast Track Roadshow is for you, rest assured that it is. And for my past and future clients who are reading this, the workshop reinforced my gratitude to you for trusting me with something as important as preserving your memories with my pictures, please don’t be strangers!