Family, Friends, Fall, & Spontaneous Adventures

The leaves haven’t yet begun to explode in reds and yellows and oranges, but it is finally beginning to feel like Fall. I woke up this morning to a neighborhood shrouded in a light fog and a cool breeze rattling my blinds as it blew into my room. As much as I love the hot, sticky, lazy days of summer, I really love the peace that comes with Fall. Maybe it’s the gorgeous backdrops I get to use for portraits or the feeling of curling up next to the fire with hot apple cider and a freshly baked pumpkin muffin. It feels like… home. For some reason, Fall reminds us all to take a step back and enjoy the simple things in life… whether it’s gathering around the kitchen table with your loved ones to carve a pumpkin… opening your front door to hundreds of little children to gift them with candy… or simply going on a walk to admire the beauty of God’s nature–the trees shedding their leaves in the most magnificent way. How captivating that there is beauty in death. We are all here on this earth for such a short time, but like the leaves that fall every Autumn, we are all here to serve a purpose, even in this temporary state in a broken world. I hope and pray every day that I’m living out God’s purpose for my life and that you are doing the same. Regardless of what each of us are specifically meant to accomplish in our lives, we are all here for the same overall reason: to serve, to love, and to ache with every fiber of our beings to do so. I am most thankful for the people in my life that teach me how to do just that. My mom and dad are the first examples of love I ever encountered. The selfless love they have demonstrated over the past twenty years has drastically impacted the person I am today, and with everything I am I WISH I could be showing you pictures of my mom and all of us together in the images below. But with her being gone, my dad’s love has somehow grown stronger and filled the void that my mom left behind. I will never forget that. I never want to forget it! That’s why I’m taking pictures at every opportunity I possibly can. Every moment is SO special with your loved ones. How I wish that I had more pictures with my mom or my Uncle John or my Grandpa Jim. Just to be able to look at their faces and remember the memory of that specific moment in time when we were together. I love this business because it gives me the rare gift of capturing those moments for people! I know that I will now never forget that one afternoon in October when Justin and Joey came to meet me and my family to take pictures – all of us dressed up, the boys just wanting to play and teaching Joey how to use my camera and telling Paola how ridiculously photogenic she is and posing my little sister and my DAD for the first time! It is so important to sometimes just drop everything you’re doing and go on an adventure with each other… and it’s all the more exciting and special when you have a way to document those spontaneous adventures. So GET OUT THERE and do fun things with the people you love!! Have an amazing rest of your Fall season!