Katharine Elizabeth Photography {the blog}

This guy was the first at the barn to finish his dinner last night.

He just hung his head there while everyone else kept quietly munching.

I’ve been there, buddy.  I’ve been there.

Hi. I am still here. I swear.

And I have a wonderfully busy month of photos ahead with some great families that I am excited to see again. I’ve been waiting for Spring to go ahead and start doing its Spring Stuff, but it’s just not happening. So I am going to sally forth. Tally-ho!

Here, in the meantime, this is a picture of my daughter turning 7 (that is a cake made of fruit … because she is the only 1st grader on the planet who doesn’t like cake).

And a picture of the cats after the party. They were on Balloon Patrol for days. They bided their time until those birthday balloons lost their helium and eventually sank down to their feline demise.

Happy Spring. We will chat again very shortly…

Christmas is almost here.  This year doesn’t feel as rushed.  As stressful.  And when I think of the heartbreak and sheer hell all of those families are going through in Connecticut, it makes frantic To Do lists and worrying over what time to start holiday dinners seem trivial.

We are blessed.  We are together.  Nothing else matters.

The busy holiday photo session season has wound down.  And I can’t lie — it’s a welcome lull.  However, I had the great opportunity this week to shoot the cover image for February’s Savvy.mn issue.  It was a really fun session — I’ve never watched a make-up and hair artist perform magic like he did on the lovely cover subject, but I am now fully convinced that I need someone to come to my house every morning to transform my face the way I saw this make-up artist do.  Wow.  It sure beats my “mascara and cherry chapstick” routine.

I’ll post here when the cover comes out in February.

I also tried to get a picture of my kids for a holiday card.  That went swimmingly… ha.

And it snowed. 
We went from this, just a few weeks ago…

…to Instant Winter this week.

But it makes the holiday lights in the yard look pretty.  And the thought of having a White Christmas this year — rather than a Brown Christmas like last year — is kind of nice.

Speaking of Instant Winter, last week, a little dog across the street from us had a mishap on a neighborhood pond…

I happened to have my camera already cued up (from trying to take the failed Christmas card picture of my kids), so I was able to catch the Shakopee Fire Department rescuing this lucky pup.

Winter may have come in one, quick snowfall, but the ice is still thin — good to remember.

Lastly, we got our holiday decorations up around the house last week.  The kittens (now 6 months old) have never seen a Christmas tree.

It took the smaller one 2 hours to figure out the ornaments came off.

And another 24 hours to figure out he could climb it.

Ah well.  At least they are enjoying the season.

I took a planned, one-week break from sessions to get a few things off my To Do list.

One of the things that I can now cross off that list is getting a farmhouse beadboard backsplash up in our kitchen.

This is one of those projects where my husband and I thought, “Ah, this won’t be too hard.  Shouldn’t take us long.”  And then it ended up being way more complicated than we thought and took for freaking-ever to finish.

Although that pretty much describes how every home improvement project goes, right?  Right.

But it’s done now, and we are very happy with it.  Just a subtle change, but a nice one.

The one thing that killed me about this project is that the outlet covers cost us more than all of the wood and trim pieces combined.  I am still not quite done accepting that fact.

Another thing I did during this little hiatus was an annual “photo album weekend” that my girlfriend and I do each fall.

Neither of us does scrapbooking, but we both maintain photo albums for our families.  So one weekend each fall, we rent a nice hotel room in town and spend Friday, Saturday, and Sunday updating all of our photo albums while we eat chocolate, drink wine, and chat about everything under the sun — kid stories, college stories, dating stories, life views, and all of the funny and wonderful things we still can learn about each other.

It is a weekend I look forward to each year.  A pause button on daily life, time spent with a good friend, a little extra sleep, and of course, leaving on Sunday afternoon with photo albums back up-to-date with our family’s daily adventures.

Albums with pictures of time spent being goofy:

Time spent out and about:

Time spent with friends:

Time spent being lazy:

And time spent being happy:

It was nice to take a little break and finish up these albums, get some stuff done around the house, and spend some time with family and friends.

Life is good. It really is.

Before we jump into fall sessions (oh yes, it’s that time!), I want to share some photos of a few wonderful animals who have crossed my path over the past month.

I love taking pictures of animals.  My friends already know this and have accepted it.  If you have a dog or a cat or a horse or a hamster, I will be taking a picture of it; you’re just going to have to deal.

This lovely Arabian boards at the stable where I ride.  He is gorgeous.

And this handsome lab belongs to the parents of some friends of ours.  We got to spend a weekend with this guy at their Wisconsin home and he is just a fantastic dog.

He loves the water. 

If he wasn’t near the water…

…he was in the water.

What a great dog.

This is his good friend, an old English Setter, taking a little nap by the campfire.

She is one of the softest, friendliest dogs you’ll meet.

And THIS little guy absolutely made my weekend. 

We were invited to a cabin weekend with several other families and one of the (terrific) families brought their chihuahua mix with them. This was his first time ever on a boat…

…but you’d have never known.  He settled in like a longtime sea dog.

Look at that face.  Could this dog be any more endearing?

Not only did we find out that he is secretly a water dog, we also found out he likes to play cards.

Well, sort of…

He slept like that for the better part of an hour.

Lastly, of course, is a picture of our own family’s new additions:

They haven’t had much trouble making themselves at home.

Gosh, I wonder what would our lives be without the animals who so colorfully populate them.

I am glad we will never have to know.