A few of my favorite things

I LOVE WEDDINGS! Seriously, weddings are so great. The dress, the flowers, the decorations, the suits, the chaos: it's all beauty to me. I've had part in two weddings this year.

The first one, in June, I was the maid of honor for my friend Amber. Now, her wedding was not traditional. Both her and her husband had kid/s from previous relationships/marriages. Since they're all still under 10, and these two in general are just not the big fancy wedding type, they got married at The wAIRhouse in Salt Lake. This is a trampoline park. It sounds weird, but it was so perfect. The kids were able to enjoy the wedding and everyone loved it.

The second wedding is my cousin's. He married a gorgeous and funny girl that fits his world perfectly. I'd only met her once before, but even then, I knew she was the one for him. I think we all did. They got married in Wisconsin this past weekend, so we went out to just go to the wedding. When I got there I decided to put my camera to use and play around a bit. I took a few classes, I can now shoot manual, but I am in no way a pro. It was so exciting. They weren't planning on doing actual photo shoots or anything, but I still got them to do a few poses. Other than that, it was just capturing the happenings. It was so much fun. I took well over 1000 pictures, several of the same things of course. After weeding it down and editing, there are over 292. A few of those are duplicated with different coloring and whatnot. In any case, I feel like i was able to help preserve the memories of this fantastic day. If I had more planning and time to model people, I probably could have done more. BUT I feel like they were perfect and we captured the essance of the group.

I love that I was able to be a part of two weddings this year, I still sometimes dream of working with more weddings. Maybe someday!

Here are a few pictures.

Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

Our new work schedules came out for Sept 15- Jan 12. I will be back to a more "normal" schedule, 4:00 pm - 12:30 am, with Thursday and Friday off. This is going to be so great for so many reasons. I will still be able to keep Sawyer home with me, since I'll start work when Josh gets home. Since it's ending just after midnight, I'll actually get sleep at night!! I won't be a zombie all day! Yay! Weekends I can actually be with family, rather than sleeping all day to try to make up for the weekdays! Although it means that I'll have less daytime with my boys before we put Sawyer to bed, it'll make the rest of the time more liveable and usable. And since I'm working from home, I'll be able to take breaks with them, like for dinner and helping to put Sawyer to bed. As for the days off, our office is 24 hour, 365 days a year. Meaning we don't get holidays off unless we're already scheduled off or we request it and there's only limited approval for requests. Christmas is on a Thursday this year! This means I'll have ALL of the holidays off, including Josh's birthday as it falls on the day after Thanksgiving. This really helps me for a few reasons, one of which being that I had planned on being on maternity leave for the holidays since I was due Dec 17. When I lost the baby, I thought all hope for holiday time with family was lost. My seniority is so low in my department that I knew that my request for Christmas would never be approved, as there are too many other people ahead of me. Needless to say, we're pretty happy with the new schedule.

In other news, working from home is still awesome. Even though I hate working until 4:30 am currently, it sometimes gets really slow, with a lot of downtime. So, I've been doing some projects in my downtime. I've completed a few that had been started long before, as well as started and finished some new ones. Most of the projects are for my walls in the office. I really want to do a travel theme, but couldn't find a map that I liked, so I'm making one. I also have a little file system from Ikea that I've dressed up. I made some pillow cases for Sawyer and finally added vinyl labels to some jars and other containers. Here are a couple pictures of some of the projects. There are others too, but I'll post those another time.

 I still need to color the map in, but I've got the outline! After I get it colored in, I'll do a fun background.

 This is the Ikea wall hanging file system, it's a cream color metal. Very boring. Sooo.... I added some color!

Now I just need to hang it!