because i can’t make decisions and am not a graphic designer, i still don’t know what i want this blog to look like. so i’m playing around with it some more. smaller pictures, because i just can’t get into the bigger ones.
600px wide. how does this look?
i think i’m going with 600px, people. now there are are only, like, 100 or so other decisions still left to make.
This weekend I went to Dallas to sit in a 170-degree sauna. It’s the fire sudatorium at the Korean spa, and it’s totally amazing. They have several other saunas that are not as hot but that all claim to be good for your health in various ways. I just know that after spending all day sweating and soaking and napping and eating Korean food, I feel the most relaxed I’ve been in a long time. And if I get a body scrub? Where you lay on a table and get scrubbed by a woman with scrubby mitts over and over and over until you have no more dead skin left anywhere on your entire body? Then I feel the cleanest I’ve ever been. Love this place.
The building itself is set back off the road behind some self-storage units, and you drive underneath some giraffe statues to get there. (So random.) My favorite is the sign that says, “RIGHT ON.” Korean spa…right on.
Also, Dallas got 12 inches of snow last Thursday, which is a record and a crazy amount of snow for Dallas. It doesn’t usually last long once it’s on the ground there, but there were still a couple inches on the ground when we got there Friday night. Lyle spent Saturday morning playing in it.
May your days all be filled with love….
I have a new blog design! It’s not necessarily in its finished and final state so you may still see things change here and there over the next couple of weeks, but at least I’m going to let go of my perfectionist tendencies and stop fiddling over every little aspect of it and just get back to writing actual posts. The main difference is obvious–bigger pictures! Yay. And please let me know if you see anything weird about the design or how it’s rendered in your browser.
Yesterday was my birthday. I love my birthday. I love having an excuse to do something fun with friends. To celebrate I took Lyle out for cupcakes when I picked him up from school. I don’t even care much about cupcakes, but Lyle does, and it’s a cute shop, so I knew we’d have fun.
He talked the whole way there about how he wanted a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting. “Do they have that, Mommy?” I told him they did, but he wasn’t so sure. Until we walked in and he spotted them immediately…some even had sprinkles. He was in heaven.
I did this session last weekend in New York…my friend Julie just had a baby (six-weeks-old in these pictures) and asked me to do photos while I was there. I love combining photo sessions with travel so of course I said yes. And I love love love shooting in clients’ homes. We shot these in their Astoria apartment. It’s a small apartment, and the best light was in the bedroom, so we just all got on the bed for these. At the end I took them out on the balcony for a few.
I also wanted to try something new, and Julie agreed to be my guinea pig. I brought along a digital voice recorder and asked her to talk about how she felt about becoming a mom, how she felt like her life had changed with Vika’s birth, what she wanted to remember about this time. Then I synced the voice recording with the slideshow of images from her shoot. The video is about 3 1/2 minutes long.
This is Vika (Vee-ka, the Russian nickname for Victoria, which is her full name). She was born with a birth defect where her colon had not connected to her anus. So she has had to go through a few surgeries so far to correct this, starting with a colostomy–a rerouting of the colon to connect it with a hole in the abdomen wall, where they attach a bag that collects poop. You can see the bag in one of the images. After a couple more surgeries in which they will reconstruct her anus and connect the colon, the bag will be removed and she’ll be completely normal. Julie talks a little about one of the surgeries in the video.
