a blessed life?

I admit I have not been posting as I should! It has been two months without a post!!! I have actually been posting more on Facebook instead and realized there are still so many more people who read are blog than are fans on Facebook!
With that I am recommitting myself to post more frequently so that folks can see what we have been up to and where our work is going.
I am also changing up my posts and being more true to who I am! I will write about what I think and feel and what want to write about!
That said, here is my return post, and it's a bit more personal.

I often get asked "How do I get your job?"
There are many out there that assume being a photographer is a glamorous, blessed life where we travel around the world photographing beautiful people, and living it up.
Well, that is not all true. Yes we travel a lot. It's always coach, and almost always the cheapest airline we can find. We do stay in comfortable hotels, but not too swanky, unless it is the same resort where our clients are staying. We also usually fly or drive straight home so we can be with our family. Ultimately that is why we do this.
We are also not always photographing the perfect people. We photograph people and that includes everyone! We don't refuse to work with someone based on race, religion, culture, orientation, financial status. We will refuse to work with someone based on their attitude. I don't like working with mean people... That is not fun for us and when we are not having fun the quality of our images can suffer. We also don't work with people who we don't feel would be a good match for us, our style, or our personality!
Anyway, Desiree and I work incredibly hard to make this our living. I often find myself working from 7:00AM until midnight or later, just to get caught up on the work I have. Desiree takes care of 4 kids including an 8 month old baby, prepares meals, cleans the house, gets kids back and forth to school, and..and...and, She is also the area supervisor for the charity NILMDTS.org and still finds the time to meet with clients, Design cards, albums, return email and phone messages. Not an easy or glamorous life at all.
So what is the payoff?
Well we both love art and we both love love. We are able to be a part of the life and the love of so many people. We are able to sit in dressing rooms watching the pre wedding nerves run wild, we are able to sit in the delivering rooms watching moms and dads cry with joy when they look into the eyes of their baby for the first time. We are able to touch the lives of people who have been married for years and see the love they have come alive again!
We also get the satisfaction knowing that when people ask us what our dream job is, we can say we are doing it. And our kids know that, even though we get insanely busy, we are doing this for them and we are doing what we love. so when we ask them what they want to be when they grow up, and they say "I want to be an artist." we can look at them and say, 'cool!' And know that they don't all have to be computer engineers, they really can do what they want if they work hard enough for it.

So a blessed life,well, maybe not in the eyes of the twenty something year old single art student reading blogs of the SI swimsuit photographers, but in our eyes, absolutely. We have a beautiful family, beautiful friends, and beautiful clients, who most often become our friends. All that and we are doing what we love.
Of course that is just what I think!

So, I feel bad doing a post with no picture so I thought I would post one of the four reasons we are even working at all. This is a picture of our youngest; Eden Ainsley. She is almost 9 months old. She has one tooth and lots of rolls. She is our only girl and as such is completely spoiled by us and her three older brothers. It was hard to imagine myself a father, then as a father of three boys, and especially the father of a little girl but now that I am, I can't imagine myself as anything else.
So here she is.