This weekend I had a great shoot with the W family in Houston’s Hermann Park. What a great place to hang out, now that it’s not so crazy hot anymore. (And the geese sure are friendly.)
And this last one shows pretty much what the six-year-old thought of the whole thing, but he was a trooper! I love this one.
Today I had my first photo shoot since moving to Houston! Yay! I am excited to get back into the swing of things. This 17-month-old gave me about 30 minutes to photograph him this morning. I had forgotten how hard this age is to photograph. Too young to really cooperate at all, but old enough to want to run everywhere and never stay where I tried to put him. And after half an hour of running around with me, he was done.
I’ve been in the mood for b&w lately, but he has the biggest, bluest eyes so I had to include at least one in color here.
It’s the end of September, and time is totally getting away from me. It’s time to start thinking about the holidays. I’ve got some gorgeous card designs this year that are available with new photo sessions and to any clients with past sessions that have images they’d like to use from those sessions. These cards are press-printed, which means they’re printed like the regular Hallmark-type greeting cards, NOT on photo paper. (Like my holiday cards last year, for those who remember them.)
I am offering 16 different cards this year. All cards are 5×7 and have corresponding backs. The cost is $40 per set of 25. They come with white envelopes.
Here are samples of three of them (you can see I started putting photos in my samples but it was getting too time-consuming, so I quit partway through). You can see all of the designs (front and back) in my holiday card gallery.
We survived Ike, but it wasn’t fun. It was pretty scary. We weathered the storm in the corporate apartment we’ve been living in, which we moved out of this weekend (after Ike hit–talk about bad timing). In hindsight, we should have just stayed in our house, but we didn’t know. Our house had no major damage, but we did lose a lot of branches off the sycamore tree in our backyard and the fence is leaning in a spot. Of course we had lots of debris, like everyone.
We had no power and they were still saying it could be 2-4 weeks before all neighborhoods have power again, so Lyle and I left yesterday and drove up to my mom’s in Dallas, where there is electricity and food aplenty. Before we left, I sat in line for 2 hours at the only gas station I could find with any gas.
Here are two photos taken from our 13th floor apartment the night before Ike hit. These were taken just a couple minutes apart, the first looking west, and second looking southeast.
The hurricane hit us overnight, knocking out our power (including water in our 13th floor apartment), making a lot of noise, and generally being very nasty. It blew out the windows in the lobby, and then the lobby flooded, and you could hear (and feel) the air blowing like mad even in the hallway outside the doors. Finally the wind died down, the rain slowly stopped, and the flooding in the streets subsided pretty quickly.
At our new house we met lots of our neighbors as we were all outside cleaning up debris. They loaned us rakes and ladders and even offered food. And one of our neighbors has a good sense of humor.
Hurricane Ike is on its way. It’s expected to make landfall in Galveston around 1am tonight and hit downtown Houston around 7am tomorrow morning. We’ve taken what precautions we can, stocked up on water and food, and we’re now just waiting. The forecasters have been building this up for so long now that the waiting is just seeming to go on and on and on.
The worst of it in the area I’m in is supposed to be very strong winds, not flooding. They’re telling people to expect to be without electricity for at least a few days. I’ll post again when I can. Good luck to everyone in the Houston area! See you on the other side of my first hurricane…
Better late than never…I’m finally reporting that we have a house! And the movers finally delivered our stuff from California this morning (after a few delays) so we are about to start unpacking and getting settled in. Yippee!
The Children’s Museum of Houston is awesome. We have already been twice. We got a membership and it is obvious already that we are going to easily get our money’s worth out of this. It has a “Tot Spot” for babies and young toddlers, plus a dozen other fun exhibits like an old farm house, a school room, a grocery store, a TV studio, a science room, and an inventor’s studio. It’s super fun for kids and it’s fun for ME to not have to sit out in the heat at a playground.
One of my favorite parts of coming home to San Diego after a trip was walking off an airplane and seeing all the beautiful palm trees right outside the airport. Palm trees are everywhere in SD! But I was not expecting to find palm trees in Houston. Check it out. These are right in front of a spray park where kids can play in water…it’s like a bunch of fancy sprinklers, just for kids!
And despite the crazy heat here in Houston right now, I am actually thinking about the holidays already. I’ll have some info soon about Christmas/holiday sessions.
For a few weeks, Lyle has liked it when we fold his fingers so he can hold up two of them to show his age. If you asked him, “How old are you?” (or even “What is your name?”) he would hold out his hand to me and say, “More two,” which meant, of course, that he wanted me to make his fingers into a two.
But now he has learned how to do it himself, and he is VERY proud of this trick.
That big hurricane that the weather forecasters really hyped up? Turned out to mean a little bit of rain for a few hours in the afternoon, and nothing more. If I hadn’t known there was a tropical storm nearby, I’d never have any idea it was any more than just a typical Texas rainstorm.
Yesterday I met up for lunch with a friend I’ve known online for a while but had not met in person before. She lives in Delaware and was in Texas visiting relatives. She has a daughter the same age as my son. We met up at this cool Mexican restaurant called Lupe Tortilla that has a huge sandbox full of lots of fun sand toys on its deck. (Talk about a great marketing scheme for the restaurant…brilliant.)
Her daughter was kind of shy at first, and my son had no idea what to make of the whole thing at all–the fact that we sat down to eat with people he’d never seen before, that we kept asking him to hug the little girl, etc. (Her mom is a photographer, too, so of course we tried to engineer as many cute photo ops as possible.)
Then we asked Lyle to hold her hands…and this is what he did:
This is more what we were going for…
But then he decided he was all done with that.
