Well I’m back from my whirlwind trip to Dallas! It was an exhausting weekend, but a ton of fun as well. I have been running around non-stop since I got home, but I’ve finally taken just a few minutes to pick out a few of my favorites from last week’s Parker Hotel wedding.

Ricci and Mike chose to have a small intimate wedding with only family and close friends. The setting was gorgeous and the family was beautiful as well! Since it was such a small wedding they opted to hold off on their reception and went to a quiet family dinner instead. It was such a wonderful way to share their love for each other and their families and I am so honored that I was able to play a part in such a special day. I am still going through my photos searching for favorites, but these are just a few that jumped out at me on the first pass.

First up some details…. I just couldn’t get enough pictures of these shoes

Some final touches… adding the earrings

A quick shot of Ricci with her beautiful daughter before the ceremony

Ricci, her father, and her daughter before the ceremony. What a gorgeous family.

A quick kiss before the walk down the aisle. They are so precious together!

After the ceremony we had so much fun running around the hotel grounds to take portraits. Since we didn’t have a reception to rush off to we got to have a lot of fun with different locations and lighting set ups. Have you ever seen a more gorgeous bride?

The handsome groom

And some crazy off camera lighting just for kicks… what a way to wrap up the night

This is going to be a quick post! I just returned home from a super-quick trip out to Palm Springs where I shot an amazing intimate family wedding at the Parker hotel with Crissy. I am leaving tomorrow for a trip to Dallas and I won’t have time to edit and post my favorites from this wedding until I get back… but I couldn’t just go a whole weekend without posting any photos. So instead I’m going to leave you with just one…

With a bride in shoes as funky as this, you know you’re in for a great day!

Stay tuned to the blog early next week for the full post on my first ’08 wedding!

Well the holidays are officially over. It’s been a busy couple of weeks so I haven’t had much time to update the blog. I was hoping to put up a separate Christmas post before new years but clearly that didn’t happen… so now you just have to sit through my Christmas and new years posts all at once. And get comfortable because this is about to be a long one, but trust me… this is the abridged version. You’re lucky I didn’t post photos from my family white elephant gift exchange

My favorite part about going home for the holidays is getting to spend time with friends and family. We typically play a lot of games, mostly apples to apples (which I love) and boggle (which I love even more… I think it may just be the best game ever invented!)

We also have a tradition in my family of always building ginger bread houses at Christmas. Leave it to Ben the architect to build a crazy round house. It was pretty fabulous.

On Christmas morning we open all of our presents in our pajamas like little kids. I will spare Ben the embarrassment of posting photos of him in his pajamas but I couldn’t help posting this one of my sister. Just look at the excitement on her face! You’d never guess that gift was a pillow. Yes. A pillow. She’s easy to please

She painted an amazing landscape (from a photo she took in Maui) for her boyfriend for his gift. Isn’t it gorgeous? She is a super talented artist.

One of Ben’s favorite gifts was his new photo toy. I think now we’re going to have ridiculous numbers of photos of each other holding our cameras because every time I went to take a photo of him, he was pointing his camera right back at me. Oh dear.

After opening presents we usually go to visit friends at their house. This year they had a new dog that I’d never met before and Oh My Gosh it was about the cutest thing that I have ever seen. They’re lucky I didn’t steal her!

Ok so that’s the Christmas photos… but now it’s time for the new years batch! We headed out to Palm Springs for the weekend with my sister and Mark, John and Valena, and my parents. What better way to spend new years eve in the desert than going to an arcade and playing mini golf?

Allison has a photo-a-day blog which she had been sadly behind on updating due to a broken camera. She got it fixed for Christmas so it was back in action on this trip. Here she is in full photographer mode.

Mark and John tallying the score. I lost. By a lot. I do not have a golf career in my future

After mini golf we went back to the house and had some time to kill before midnight. So of course in an attempt to entertain ourselves we had to balance things on each others noses.

And play lots and lots of wii. I became addicted to the Rayman Rabbids game. The dancing bunnies are hilarious.

We got all festive with hilarious party hats and noise makers…

And at midnight had copious amounts of confetti.

At the end of the night we were all pretty wiped out. I think maybe those faces were from thinking about how hard it would be to clean up all the confetti

And to finish up the set… a ridiculous self portrait of Ben and I in party hats. Don’t we look awesome?

All in all it was a wonderful holiday season. If you made it to the bottom of this post, congratulations. That was a lot of Regnier family holiday to wade through I hope you all had a wonderful new year. Stay tuned to the blog in the next few days, I’m heading out for my first wedding of the year on Thursday so there’s lots of excitement yet to come!