This afternoon my lovely husband and I headed out in the sunshine to shoot a maternity portrait session. I absolutely love maternity portraits, and this session was extra special…. because the subject of all of the photos was ME!!

Yes, you read that right, and yes, that means I’m pregnant! But that’s not the end of the story, the other half is that I’m pregnant with TWINS! We’ve always known we wanted to have kids and we were completely overjoyed when we found out that we were going to be expecting a little one in November, but now that we know it’s two we feel doubly blessed At our most recent doctor’s appointment we found out via ultrasound that we are going to be having one boy and one girl, which means for all of you wondering out there that they are fraternal, not identical.

Having a due date in November means that I’m actually still in my second trimester, which is normally too early to do maternity photos, but since I have these TWO babies, my belly has made an appearance rather early I will definitely be doing some more “official” maternity photos with another photographer once I’m farther along and even bigger but for now here are a few shots that Ben took. I love my little belly

I will probably be making periodic baby/belly updates from now on, and I’ll definitely be posting my “official” maternity photos once I have them taken. I still don’t know who will be taking them yet, so any suggestion or volunteers are definitely welcome Picking a photographer is just one thing on our very long list of things to do to get ready for our babies!! I can’t wait to meet them!

As the photographer at the vast majority of weddings that I attend I’m not really used to seeing myself in photos. At Sunday’s wedding the father of the bride, Dan Mitchell (check out his work here) just happened to be quite a talented photographer himself and he managed to sneak in a couple of shots of me and my lovely husband (aka second shooter) in action. Check out the gorgeous surroundings. With a location and lighting like this how could you go wrong?!

And just for fun here’s the shot that I was busy capturing while Dan was taking his shot

On Sunday I had the pleasure of photographing the wedding of the incredibly sweet Kelsey and Mel. They are such a genuine and loving couple and I had an absolute blast working with them, despite the heat wave sweeping southern California

I know how excited my couples always are to see their photos after their session so I thought I’d throw out a little teaser for these two. You are going to love all of your images, but you’re just going to have to wait a few more days to see them For now here are two of my favorites, enjoy!

For those of you who tried to visit my site earlier today you may have been confronted with a dreaded “connection timeout” page instead of my lovely blog.

Sorry. That really stinks.

I spent much of the morning in contact with my web host’s customer service (most of it with me on hold, interspersed with questions like “so do you know what’s wrong with it yet? is it fixed?” to which they would answer no, not yet, and we don’t know) The whole experience was very frustrating.

The good news is that it now appears to be up and running again (hooray ) I also took the opportunity while the site was down to do a much needed upgrade to my blogging platform, so it should have fixed a few of the little bugs that have been plaguing me for the last few months. I have gotten emails that my comments were not working, but they should be good to go now. Please let me know if you have trouble leaving me a comment, I love to hear when things are screwy so I can fix them!

And the last little piece of business.. I’m not sure what happened to any emails that I received today while my server was in internet limbo and not available, so if you sent me a message earlier today PLEASE don’t be upset if it bounced or you did not get a reply. I’d really appreciate if you could resend.

Thanks for your patience with the site maintenance, now back to our regularly scheduled programming

Ok so pretty much the same disclaimer has to go with this post as the last one…. be prepared for lots of images, lots of all caps and exclamations, and gratuitous numbers of smiley faces Here comes the engagement session that I shot last weekend for my fantabulous little sister Allison and her fiance Mark! I cannot possibly overstate how much my sister means to me, she is one of my absolute bestest of friends, she knows all of my secrets, and well, I’ve just known her all her life so you can’t get much closer than that I was so excited to find out that she was getting married (I think I may have scared the other diners in the restaurant where I got the phone call since I was shrieking so much) and I couldn’t be happier that Mark is the lucky guy! We took their engagement photos on a fabulous San Diego afternoon in Balboa Park and had a blast (as long as we stayed in the shade, because man oh man was it hot out!) Hold on to your seats because this is about to be a super long photo post with a super good lookin’ couple Are you ready?

Balboa park is so stinkin’ scenic aint it? I LOVE San Diego

I like to call this one the super hero shot, it’s totally going on the poster for any future action movies they happen to star in

I told you these two were good looking… man I can’t wait to see their kids (just kidding guys, you can wait at least a month or two after the wedding, haha!)

I’m not sure why but this is one of my favorites… I think I like the color of blue with the awesome red dress. If you’re wondering what to wear in an engagement session and you look good in red, it almost always looks fabulous in photographs!

And one last snap on the way back out to the car…. so cute!

Allison and Mark thanks so much for letting me drag you all around the park in the super hot afternoon. I love you guys and I CANNOT WAIT for your wedding (which by the way will be photographed by the super talented Mindy Sonshine and her husband Mike, I can’t wait to see the photos ) Allison… you can now officially stop blog stalking, you’re posted!! Now you just have to wait to see the FULL set…. aren’t you dying?