Pacing The Panic Room

Bikes & Boots

2012-01-26T08:46:00.003-05:00

These particular boots were a gift from Mr Jason Hudson when he came to visit us before our trip to Alt Summit.

I have been watching all these photo of the day challenges unfolding online, and on instagram focusing on daily themes and assignments, and it inspired me a little to try and assign myself a theme to start shooting more again around the house. So I wanted to try and document what everyone is into lately around here. I look back on old photos of me as a child and sometimes catch a glimpse of toys and books in the background and focus in and try and remember all the time I spent playing with that particular toy. I recently saw a slide of me and my sister and there is an old Lone Ranger doll sitting on Silver in the background and I instantly remembered the hours I spent looking through our crazy colored 70's shag rug for his pistol, and never being able to find it. So my Lone Ranger had an empty holster most of his toy career. Sometimes I wish I had more pictures of my stuff I was into. So...I decided I would go ahead and get into the habit of this when I notice a craze moving through the house.

There are currently two obsessions going on in our house, Cole is a full fledged bicycle nut, and Tessa is deeply infatuated with boots-- so much that just yesterday, I watched her try for over 5 minutes, put a pair of boots on over top of the boots she was already wearing. I just hope Tessa ends up with a sister so she can pass down her boot collection to someone. As for Cole and the bikes, I was so thrilled to finally be able to get her dream bike for her. It arrived while we were in Utah attending Alt Summit and when we got home late in the night, she rushed out to the garage and ripped into this gargantuan shipping box, and met her bicycle. She was in love instantly.

P.S. Last week Jason posted our first family photos of us taken and today he posted some more featuring Tessa Tangerine! Please go and enjoy them HERE!

Our First Family Photos

2012-01-23T08:54:00.000-05:00

I am sitting here in Salt Lake City next to Cole, it just started to snow, and I mean really, REALLY snow, great big fluffy sticky flakes, it feels perfect right now because we are so insanely tired from this last week at Alt Summit that all I want to do is sit here and watch this snow pile up, trap us inside for hours. Be still. This morning I taught my workshop with the mega talented and always fancy Mr. Jason Hudson to an alert and eager class of participants. If you haven't been reading here, Jason and I taught a super basic intro to studio lighting workshop just to get people to stop being afraid of light. It was a really nice mix of people and I wish we had all day just to play with the light set-ups and get deeper into things. We rented a couple of very basic mono-light kits and some paper backdrops and got our hands dirty with the class. In the interest of time we had to blow through a few topics that I wanted to focus on more, and I felt like I was constantly backing away from saying things in an attempt to keep things simple and moving along smoothly. Jason and I both agreed we would love to design a full day workshop and really dig in. Fun. Who wants to come hangout with Jason and I?

Speaking of Jason Hudson, while we were at Alt Summit he managed to put some photos together from his visit with us last week. Jason spent a few days with us at our home before we set sail for the winter wonderland of SLC. Cole and I have never hired a photographer before to take pictures of us, mainly because I am a pretty huge baby about having my picture taken, and am overly picky and critical about who to hire. It had been bugging me that I was pretty much a ghost in terms of photos, and I really wanted to be sure that the kids had something to look back on where I was included in their memories when they are older. Jason is not a family photographer by design, and so I knew he would be perfect for the job, I wanted someone that would hangout with us, get comfortable, and grab the little pieces of life that just happen. I can't even begin to tell you how much these photos mean to us, and before I launch into 10 pages about it all and get overly emotional and worked up, here is the link for you to see our very first FAMILY PHOTOS. I love the job that he has done, and it was really incredible to see another photographers perspective and style come into this house and freeze seconds of our day together. This guy is subtle and quick, and doesn't miss, and the kids were able to run around be natural and just play and cry, and laugh and love, and he grabbed it all.

I will be doing a more "official" wrap up of the lovely time we had at Alt Summit soonish, but am excited to get back to posting again. Hope you enjoy the photos over at Jason's blog and I will see you soon.

Full Circle

2012-01-17T07:26:00.000-05:00

I have made reference a few times around here to a project I was in the midst of that was eating up a ton of my time. A project that took me to New York City a few times last year, and a project that taught me a lot about how much I can do on my own. I was nervous about posting the final result here, because I always get the feeling that people are like... who cares!!! Hurry up and get Cole pregnant again, geez! But Cole knows how much this video means to me, and she said, "you better put that up on your blog and stop worrying about what other people think!" And so I listened.

I don't know if anyone remembers me posting about Guido Palau before... but the story goes, I had the pleasure of hearing him speak at an event, he was a huge inspiration at a critical time in my life, and a year later I found myself making a film about him. My attraction to making the piece and getting to know the man, was that I was fascinated with how stunned he had been by his own rise to the top of his field, and that through it all he stayed grounded and didn't lose himself. He had that thing that I can so identify with, where you're just never quite satisfied with your work, you can always do just a little bit better. I know how much torture that can be...

This piece is my first step into the world of fashion, and I was happy with what I found there. Making this really solidified that I wanted to keep working on moving pictures, and I enjoy the process of telling stories so much. I'm hooked.

Cole and I are off to SLC today and beyond the fabulousness of Alt Summit, I am just so excited to be able to sit around with friends and laugh. Alt can be as non-stop as you want it to be, and my plan is to definitely take it slow and make the most of my time, and also to just enjoy having Cole near me so many days in a row. Who knows, 6 days with no kids, where we can do whatever we want and just be a couple, sounds like a recipe for more children :)

A Link List Of Exciting Things I Am Excited About

2012-01-13T09:20:00.000-05:00

Cole and Tessa make guest appearances on Oh Chloe today, with adorable scenes from their trip to NYC. Chloe was one of the very first people to come and stay with us when Tessa was born and they hadn't seen one another since. She is so lucky to have a crazy aunt Chloe who lives in the Big City.

I can't believe I am going to be going HERE in less than a month to shoot a book trailer for such a rad book. If anyone has any travel advice for me. I am all ears.

THIS guy is coming to stay with us for a couple few days before we leave for Alt Summit to take pictures of our little family. The first time we have ever had pictures of our family made. It's painful to think about getting my picture taken. I'm hoping for matching sweaters, or all white and khaki in the front lawn perhaps. Options are endless.

I feel so very lucky to get to hangout with these awesome little kids and document the transformation of this Austin, TX school (congrats to the Texas School for the Deaf) over the course of the year that won the Green Makeover Contest hosted by Global Green and Pureology. So I will be hanging in Austin a few times this year to make the short film series. Love that city.

photo source via- Global Green

Corinne is off to get her son and with the help of so many of you, she more than passed her financial goal for the trip! Thank you again, and if you are curious as to how things unfold you can read about it HERE.

Due to my poor planning this year for my trip to Alt Summit, I missed out on a spot for the Wed night dinner (which was one of my favorite things last year), so I had to suck it up and make my own plans, and now I get to share a table with the man behind the most exciting magazine about sharing tables, Nathan from Kinfolk.

THIS woman has done the impossible, and has managed to talk me into SPEAKING at a lady festival two years in a row now, this time to teach a class on mobile photography-- more specifically Instagram. And she even let me partner up with the outstanding instagrammer sensation Mr. Jason Hudson. So if you are going to be in Nashville for the conference, please take our class. We plan on being funnyish while also being informativeish.

If you're going to be at Alt Summit this year and want to hangout for drinks or just sit around and jib jab about life, Cole and I are going to be around hoping to meet as many people as we can. We had so much fun last year just hanging out with people we read online, and hope to meet even more people this year as well as visit with old friends. So drop me a line if you are going to be around. We waited too long to get a room this year so we will be staying off site with friends, but that means we are renting a car, and so that means we can see even more of SLC.

And lastly, just in case you were looking for a cool new app to keep the kids entertained, we downloaded THIS app for Tessa and LB and they are obsessed with it. They have a whole series of them and so far the favorite has been Hairdresser and the Doctor... Who knew?!

Have a great weekend ~

Still Previews

2012-01-11T07:00:00.001-05:00

I haven't had the chance to run around and just shoot still photos in a good long while, but I always try and stop and take at least a couple while I am doing video shoots. As great as the video work has been to have, and as much fun as it is to make short films, I still love framing up a still shot. So I posted the above three stills that represent some upcoming video projects that I will be sharing here soon. I am on my last day of Vegas before I head home, and of course as excited as I am to get home and see Cole and the kiddos, when I get there, I will have to stay disciplined and stay glued to my computer editing away to get these video projects all done-- which includes a hair tutorial series that I really think you are going to love.

I won't be home long, just enough to get dug back in a little, reconnect with the greatest and cutest kids alive, and get as many hugs and laughs in with them before Cole and I head off to Salt Lake City, Utah for the always fabulous Alt Summit. I have teamed up with blogger turned IRL life friend Jason Hudson from These Roving Eyes to teach a workshop on photography. Our workshop maxed out quickly and we added more space, but I believe it is all filled up again, and I am bummed for anyone that didn't get in. We plan on making the most of our time together and hope people will walk away with some new things to consider when they shoot. I am thrilled to be collaborating with so many people excited about photography. We aren't so much teaching a class as we plan on just hanging out with a bunch of people and getting creative. I love getting to pal around with bloggers that I respect so much all in one place, and if it is anything like last year the fun is endless. Have you seen the speaker list at this thing? Every time I take a look at it, there is a point when I hear myself say "wow" that I even get to be included on this list.

Videos will be coming soon. I will be sharing my short film on Guido Palau that I made for Redken that I just showed here in Vegas to a mob of screaming hair dressers, a hair tutorial series just for you, and finally a behind the scenes cover shoot I filmed in NYC last month for American Salon. Hope you love hair :)

I need to go pack and say goodbye to Vegas until next year.

Our One Good Hour on Christmas

2012-01-04T10:12:00.002-05:00

I never would have guessed that unwrapping presents could upset someone so much.

Christmas this year was difficult for us, and for the most part to be totally honest-- not much fun. I wonder how many other people out there could have written that exact same line but didn't. It's hard to kind of come clean about the holiday, even if it sucks it's something better left unsaid usually. I made a ton of mistakes going into the holiday this year, and spent the week leading up to the New Year pouring over the plans like some old battle map that went terribly wrong. Scratching my head surveying the carnage. Some of it was my fault, some of it just couldn't be helped, and some of it was not getting the chance to be around people we love because their priorities have shifted to new things, and that never feels good to be replaced. So we decided that we would just focus on our own little family unit. It would be easier to manage the chaos of the holiday if it was just us. I was feeling pretty confident we would have that dream magical morning, and spend the rest of the day playing and relaxing and watching the children smile and skip, while Cole and I high-fived one another and congratulated ourselves for being the greatest parents alive. I am such a Griswald sometimes.

When it comes to a BIG DAY like Christmas and The Littlest Buddy even the most careful and thoughtful planning could end up working against you. One of the things about his genetic disorder (SMS) is that his entire life is built around his own specific set of expectations. I have written about it before, comfort to LB is switching a light switch on and off 500 times in a row-- when he flicks it on, there is light, off, it is dark. This world makes sense to him, he knows what's coming, it's comfort.

So our Christmas plan for LB was to prepare him for the days events way in advance, in a specific order, without a ton of fuss, so that the day was the most stress free not only on him, but so that we had an environment to work within to make sure that Tessa was able to just be silly and excited and go about her day the way that she wanted to. It's hard to plan for a day where on one hand you want to fill the day full of surprises for one kid, and the other you want to keep things smooth and quiet. Tessa cannot be denied a childhood just to keep her brother calm.

The most important thing for me to do is make sure that Tessa never feels stress or tension centered around the work we do to keep LB happy and humming. I am so afraid of the day that she might resent him for taking away moments that were meant just for her. His theft of her moments happens all the time now, and to prevent that resentment from building inside of her, we have to roll with it, be careful not to make him a villain to her that sweeps in stealing her laughs and giggles with his tantrums and tears. When he does this it's hard to not respond in a way that doesn't breed resentment. We have to watch ourselves, and speak to him with compassion and not in a scolding way, at the same time we have to still be sure to correct his behavior while trying and preserve what is left of the original moment for her, and find a way to incorporate keeping him calm into her growing excitement. We refuse to teach Tessa that to celebrate and enjoy the unexpected moments of our life is to do so not in the presence of her brother. We will not teach her to remove him from the equation, because that behavior will be mirrored later in life. So it's all about incorporating his reactions into her surprises and making it all okay. Sounds like a lot of work? Well it is.

So Christmas.

Everything about the holiday is bad for LB. Let me take one example. You want to watch a Christmas movie on Christmas Eve? Ha! Well LB has never seen this movie, so it becomes a stress and a meltdown. So just to be able to play something like the Grinch or Rudolph means that we bought the films in early Nov, and I started playing them two or three times a week when I could sneak them into a day. The first ten times it's like someone is scratching nails across a chalkboard around him. He runs out of the room, he bites himself, he cries, he gets mad it isn't something that he knows. Who are these people, and what are these things, and why does that nose sound like this?!! If you stick with it, soon after the tenth time, he starts to point at the characters and say their names like friends, and his body language changes, all the sudden the predictability of a moment becomes a comfort and he is excited to see the film go in. So that way when you want to pop in ol' Gricnchy on Christmas Eve for the kids to watch, it doesn't become a moment of disaster and tears. Of course by this time, nobody else has any real interest in seeing it.

On our Christmas day, I could list all of the things that went wrong, and how hard it was to keep Tessa excited and thrilled while we tried to keep The Littlest Buddy from having an epic meltdown. I made all kinds of little mistakes in the moment, but the new one this year that surprised us, was that for the first time ever the presents being wrapped were too much to handle. In the past preparing him for a box wrapped in paper with a surprise inside was enough, he could handle it. He expected the surprise. This year, he couldn't handle the not knowing, he would unwrap something, and it would upset him, the more gifts the more the anger grew, half way through he was throwing boxes on the ground, and running in and out of the room shouting, tears streaming down his face, snot bubbles bursting, he was on red faced fire. He hated this. And for the first time in her little life, Tessa stopped what she was doing, her smile faded from her face, she looked concerned and confused, and she said: "what's wrong with LB?" Except she used his real name of course :)

it wad the first time that she asked us about his behavior. You could just see the confusion unfolding, she was jumping up and down excited and thrilled, and her brother was coming apart at the seams. She was baffled.

It was a light year in terms of gifts, we would stop in between each gift being unwrapped and actually take the toy out of the box, set it up, and play with it for a few minutes, so it wasn't just a frenzy. Nothing worked. There was a point when he stood over us, with his new Toy Story comforter held up over his head and you could see him considering hurling it at us. Cole, looked him down... "don't you do it." and the little fires of rage burning behind his eyes were growing, and she just scooped him up, curled him into a little ball, placed him in her lap, his fingers went into his mouth, she sang him some familiar songs, and rocked him a little, and there he remained the rest of the morning while presents were unwrapped. He stayed in a far away little trance away from Christmas until it was over, and Tessa kept having a blast excited over her surprises, but for the first time ever, with a close eye of concern on her brother.

We felt so defeated sitting there in the ripped open packages. Already planning for next year. "Well next year we won't wrap anything for him. Just put a bow on it with his name, and place it under the tree." and then someone realizes, "well then he will have a tantrum because he feels left out, and doesn't get to unwrap anything." In most cases with kids with SMS giving them a task or a job where they are being helpful makes them feel better. The more real the responsibility the greater the comfort. We left LB stranded this year as this participant in a holiday that he didn't ask to be a part of. We thought he could handle it if it was just us. The second you let yourself get tricked into thinking that the perfect gift, or a great tasting treat, is more powerful than the SMS, you are screwed. It always feels like crap to realize that there are still lingering bits of denial when it comes to his SMS. Cole and I both are guilty of it sometimes. Sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking he is really going to love something, when the whole time, it's just us wishing and hoping that he will.

Tessa had fun on Christmas, she played she laughed, she tried to make her brother play with her, she wants to include him. This is such a great victory. In the end once the chaos of the morning was over, we got to see Tessa and her brother play and laugh for an hour in his room before the next round of chaos was introduced, because we had a breakfast to attend. But for that one hour, it was awesome. And if you have a special needs child in your life, you cling to those hours, and they build up, and they are so essential, you lean on them during the hard times, and you lay in bed and spend all your energy speaking about that one awesome hour. It's so easy to know the job you're doing as a parent when you can see smiles on faces, and for us hearing Tessa and LB play together is easily one of the greatest joys on earth for us. It is such a relief any time we hear it. So this year we have that one hour to remember. Next year we will go for two.

I think one of the hardest things I have noticed about raising a kid with special needs is how often other people look at you and think, "I could do it better." People meet LB and he is sweet and charming and funny, and they think "well these two must be idiots if they can't keep him happy." Nobody knows this kid better than Cole does. Nobody. And so when I see anyone question her or speak to her in any smug shitty way about how they would do it different... I feel my fists ball up and I imagine caving teeth in. I guess I just wanted to say, that I know it's human nature to want to offer advice and perspective to people when they witness disorder or chaos, but maybe the next time you see someone right smack in the middle of that kind of chaos with their kid, and you feel like you have to say something-- maybe just let them know that they're doing a great job in some way and given them some support, some fuel to keep the endurance up. Understanding is the best gift you can get sometimes.

The Hair Virtuoso

2012-01-03T09:35:00.002-05:00

I let instagram spill the beans yesterday that I am working on some hair tutorials that will be released early next month. Some people had asked if this was for the long discussed Cole Marshall hair blog, and I am here to say... Nope, it is not. We have not moved forward with her blog yet as we are deep in the middle of other shenanigans that took priority over it. However, she was involved in a fabulous project that I filmed for the salon that her friend Bailey put together. We managed to shoot 5 of them yesterday at the house, largely because Cole kept the kids happy and busy and I was able to get a bunch of shooting done in big chunks. It was a fun day. Always love shooting at home for some reason.

In case you aren't a hopeless instagram addict like myself, here are some behind the scenes shots from the phone yesterday ...

For the most part the kids were out of the house, busy playing with Cole, at the dentist, and then big naps. They did get to look in on the action a little from time to time. Curious eyes, Tessa was shy around the girls, The Littlest Buddy was sure to get kisses. But by the end after naps were had, Tessa started to get really curious about what her mama was doing. She stormed the set and shut things down for the day.

When the shoot wrapped for the day, and everyone had left. I was in the other room, and Tessa had slipped off into the playroom and recruited some of her stuffed pals for makeovers. She took them onto set, placed them in the styling chair, and then she went to work. Cole and I watched her from a distance with jaws dropped for a good 10 minutes. She was going through the motions brushing out hair, pretending to put in clips, blow drying, and waving the hair spray around their heads like a pro. She even picked up a bobby pin and placed it in her teeth to work.

Kids immersed in their imaginations is pure magic. I had seen Tessa play pretend before, but this was the first time I started to notice the depths of the detail and dedication to the fantasy. It was incredible.

It wasn't long before Tessa wanted some real hair to work on, so she grabbed Cole's hand and pulled her to the chair, and not to be out done, as soon as The Littlest Buddy saw his little sister with the hair dryer, he insisted he have a go with it too.

It was one of those nights where Cole and I found ourselves up later than we should ever stay awake, long after the kids were in bed, and the night filled with sweet sighs and whispers about what a great life we have.

I truly feel lucky. I need to let myself feel these good things way more often. Truly feel them. These kids aren't going to want to play with us forever.

It's Not a Comeback, It's a Murder

2011-12-30T09:21:00.002-05:00

On the third day of life with a trainer I arrived at the gym, climbed onto a treadmill, and decided it would be a cool idea to show these people that I am not just a soft sack of pudding. So I put myself through an aggressive cardio routine, that sure enough caught the attention of some of the other softies at the gym. I would walk for 90 seconds, and then bump up the treadmill to a full sprint for 90 seconds, and then walk, and then sprint, and I did this for 20 minutes. It was awesome.

15 minutes later, barely into my actual workout with my trainer, I broke into a cold sweat, my knees wobbled, and I was on the ground, outside, passed out cold, for two and a half minutes.

I fainted at the gym. Ugh... It was really hard to suck it up and walk back in there. Feeling like everyone was looking at me like, "there's the dude that fainted, what a wimp!"

Today marks the end of my third week, and my entire body hurts. Places around my body that have never spoke up before with funny names like lats, and quads, and parts that end in oids, are now screaming their collective heads off in quivering pain whenever I move a little too much. Yesterday I wailed on my pecs. You have to wail on them you know.

I am writing this for the people that are going to wake up on Monday that have decided that they are really going to make it happen this time. To all of the people that are going to drop weight, and get fit in 2012. I am 3 weeks ahead of you. And I am here telling you that it sucks. It hurts. It hurts really bad actually. You know what else? You don't see any results right away. Unless you consider not passing out lately a result. Not throwing up in your car in the parking lot progress. I can't tell if I feel any better or have more energy, because I am in miserable pain when I move even inches. Poor Cole has heard me whine and bitch about my body hurting more than any person should ever have to endure. If I do anything, like get up and walk to the kitchen for a drink of water, I say "oh my god this hurts so bad!" no less than 5 times, and then 5 times on my way back to the couch.

One thing that has honestly been a big change is our sex life. It's not more vigorous and intense like I have heard can happen, it kind of goes like this, where I say: "so you're cool if I just lay here really still and not move at all, because I am going to cry if I have to do anything more than that."

All jokes aside, the big difference 3 weeks in is that I can't wait to go back to the gym. I go again on Monday, and I wish Monday was tomorrow. I want to go every day. I got home yesterday and my body felt like a jar of jelly with some noodles hanging off of it, and I still wanted to go run. I didn't feel this way last week. Half way through week two I would drive home from the gym and I would think up excuses on how to stop going that didn't make me sound like a total wimp. I was looking for a way to quit. I was actually wishing for the flu or something. I'm not sure what happened, but something clicked this last workout. I signed up to go every single day next week until I leave for Vegas. I am as they say, hooked.

So for now. Turning the corner on week four, I like to pretend that I am fighting one of those gremlins, you know the ones that climb onto an airplane and rips it apart for a laugh. I imagine this gremlin got inside of me a long time ago, it snuck in stowed away in a bacon cheeseburger donut, fast food corporations plant them in the food so we keep eating their shit. And once it was inside of me, it took over completely and started ripping me apart. All of my muscles turned to pudding, and this gremlin has been winning. This thing fucks my shit up, and it can push on my brain and convince me that eating things like the brand new quadruple bacon stack melt, that's sandwiched between two pieces of fried chicken instead of bread now with crushed up cheddar chili spice fritos smashed into it is a good idea. So now I am on a mission to murder this little bastard before he kills me. I pretend that each time I exercise, my muscles hurt because it is digging it's little claws into my body trying to cling on. Every inch of fat I lose, is one less hiding spot for this bastard to hide in. The more I lose, the easier it will be to find this thing, and kill it once and for all. The less junk I eat, the more I starve it out. The more muscle I build, the stronger I am to fight this thing out of my body. I want my body back. That's all this is, a fight for your body back. So fight.

So maybe think about your resolution differently this year. Maybe it shouldn't be so big. Just promise yourself you will get past the second week. Maybe all the lights will turn on when you hit week three like it has for me. Maybe not. I'm not making promises, and I am certainly not an expert, I'm just telling you that no matter what you do, if you're doing it right, you're not going to like it at first, (that gremlin really isn't going to like it) and the changes that are occurring are not the kind of changes you are hoping for. Your clothes don't fit any better, and your body looks the same. The one little treat you get, if you are eating right and working hard, is you lose that easy water weight. So you do get one little weight victory on the scale. I suggest you don't even look at the scale the first few weeks. Don't go into this dreaming about being skinny, think about it like I can't wait to not feel sick when I exercise. You have to visualize that you are laying a foundation. You have to keep it in your head that what you are doing in the early weeks is making it so that your body can start to physically change. The stronger you are, the quicker you can get cardio fit, the faster you can start to make the changes you are looking for. That's when you can start sculpting.

One last thought, and I only mention it because it made me feel a lot of shame and really crazy in the beginning. It's important to remember that the majority of us were raised to reward ourselves with sweets and junk when we would work hard at something that we didn't really want to do but did anyway-- so don't be surprised when you sweat it out in the gym for 2 hours and later that day find yourself in the kitchen justifying the spoon in your hand digging into that tub of ice cream. These are old habits. It's in your head. You're not hopelessly sick or disgusting. You just have a trigger, hard work, equals treats. So don't be a fool about it, just get some not so bad "treats" to have lying around your house. Keep your reward system intact, just find a group of things that become your new treats. Lucky for me Clementines are still in season and so I can stand in the kitchen and eat them like candy. I am still fighting that urge to eat bad. I can hear myself say, "I deserve this." I feel like this is one habit that is going to take a long time to crush.

So that's it for me in 2011 here. I am looking forward to a gremlin free 2012. I wonder how much clearer I will think, and how much harder I can work when I am rid of that thing...

Thanks to everyone that wrote an encouraging word, or gave good advice or perspective when I started this. I am sure I will hit many roadblocks along the way, so it is rad to know there are people out there that can keep me going.

Hope everyone has a great New Years Eve, maybe throw in one or two really extra crazy resolutions this year, so when you start breaking them, you keep the ones that you need to be keeping.

Good luck.

P.S. Did you happen to see the chipin widget in the sidebar today?! We did it. Corinne hit 100% this morning. How amazing is that? HUGE thanks to anyone that donated and a really extra HUGE thank you to anyone that posted about it, or spread the word around blog land. So very cool and I am so excited for her.

Clicks

2011-12-22T08:00:00.001-05:00

I have five rolls of film sitting on my counter that have yet to make it to the lab. I keep putting it off, or running out of time. I need to get on top of this.

I know there has been a real shortage of photos around here lately, so in the meantime I scanned in some instant film I had lying around, and dumped a CF card off my 7D. The picture taking has been light around here. I have been buried finishing up a project that is due the first week of January, and it is by far the biggest thing I have ever tackled.

More about that later, first here are some pictures-- from brand new pillow day, to bikes and sunsets, to cookie parties.

I love that Cole and her Grandma make the same concentration face. If you ever get your hair done by Cole, this is her "hair face" so funny. Does your stylist have a "hair face" that they make? Take a look the next time you're getting your hair done, I bet they do.

So the reason for the big photo shortage around here has been this project I mentioned. I don't know if anyone remembers me posting about THIS hero of mine... but what happened is that I contacted some people at Redken and begged them to let me make a film about him, (did I mention begged?) and they finally said yes and agreed. What was supposed to be a little 2 minute piece, turned into a giant project. I ended up following him around and capturing the very cool process of taking a set of brand new not yet released products through testing, to the runways at Fashion Week, to a final national shoot showing off a brand new trend collection. So to say the least, that has been a ton of footage to get through.

I am nearing the end, and will be flying off to Vegas soon to show it to a crowd of a few thousand rowdy hairdressers. No big deal. I'm sure that won't make me nervous at all. Ugh. I've had heartburn for weeks already.

So most of my days when Cole isn't working, I am glued to my computer, editing, and nail biting, and watching a render bar. Wheee! It's hard to be in full on fitness rage mindset, and then spend 9 hours glued to a chair sitting staring up at a monitor.

So almost done.

Just in time for Christmas.

P.S. did you get the chance to read yesterdays post? Every dollar matters, it really adds up quickly. So even if you think $5 doesn't matter. No way. It totally does. If everyone that stopped by here to look at this blog smacked down $5 bucks. Oh my gosh! So anyway my point is that sometimes people don't donate because they think what they can spare isn't enough, every little penny matters. Thanks to everyone that took the time to read her story.

Wheels Up!

2011-12-21T08:39:00.002-05:00

**Wow! 60% reached. It really does add up quickly. Thanks to everyone who has shared this story today even if you can't contribute, spreading the word helps just as much.

**AWESOME!! It's only 11AM and we got her up to 50% thank you all so much. Every little bit helps. Would be amazing to get her all the way there by the end of the day :) What a gift. dollars and cents add up fast when everyone acts in force.

I wanted to put some light on a friend in this space today that needs a bit of HELP, in the hopes that maybe a few more people that are in the position to do good things during this season of giving would find this story and be compelled. It's also here for friends that have lost touch or moved far away that might not know what our pal Corinne has been up to in the last year.

I have to also point out, that Corinne is not just a dear friend to this family, but she is also Cole's boss. She owns the salon that Cole is employed, so I figured if I were able to help her, then Cole will totally get special treatment at work :) I'm kidding. Geez.

But she is, she is Cole's boss, she is our dear friend, and she has done so many good things for us, for our family, she has given us the time to figure out so many things. She actually pulled money together when Cole and I were struggling financially and paid for our Doula, who helped bring Tessa Tangerine into this world. Corinne did not pressure Cole to hurry up and get back from maternity leave after Tessa was born, she did not pressure Cole to hurry up and come back to work when she took a leave so that I could work on a video project, she has always kept her spot waiting for her at the salon. She is supportive of our schedules, and of The Littlest Buddie's special needs and his extraordinary amount of doctors appointments and therapy, she has always been the best kind of teacher to Cole, and if all that wasn't enough-- this is the lady that found our dog Wendy, tied to a stop sign with a note that read: 'found dog' and she gave her a home, and made sure that she found her a good place to go. Luckily that place was our home after Cole fell in love her.

So this is the deal. Corinne has been going through the adoption process for over a year now. Her determination to love and raise a child, her want to be a mother had grown so much that she started down the road to adoption and found herself suddenly in love with a little boy who lived in Ethiopia who had been abandoned by his family. She was sent just a couple pictures of him, lying on his back, just one month old, waiting for his life to get started in an orphanage. He had no idea how lucky he was yet that Corinne was going to be his new Mama.

Corinne, flew to Ethiopia to meet him, and to go through the court process of legally adopting him, which she has done. She is his mother, he is her son. She has shared her journey and all the sights and sounds and experiences at the orphanage over at her Tumblr Wheels-Up!. If you scroll down to the bottom you can start at the beginning and see how quickly the two of them discovered they needed one another.

Here are a couple screen shots of her Tumblr.

So I will let you discover the rest of her story on your own, I encourage you to read on over at her space.

Here is my plea for her case...

In most cases the adoptive parents fly over to Ethiopia, they meet their babies, they go through court, they go home, and then they wait for months at a time for the green light to finally go back and pick up their child. The window they gave Corinne was 3-6 months, even hinted at longer. After Corinne met her son, and saw that for his first 8 months he had not done much more beyond lie on his back with a bottle, and had never seen the light of day, she couldn't justify leaving him for these vital developmental months. Her trip kept extending longer, and her thoughts kept drifting to staying until she could take him home. She started working with him, doing therapy with him, getting him sitting up, and eating, taking him on outings, and breaking the habit of laying down with a bottle which was giving him nasty ear infections. The more she stayed, the stronger he became. The more she loved him, the more he loved her. She was instantly his mother.

So she made her decision to stay and live in Ethiopia and keep her boy happy and healthy during the grueling waiting period to bring him back home.

First she had to return to America for a few weeks to get things in order at the salon, and rent out her home, and make sure that her family at the salon was okay and that they understood why she had to go back. It's a good thing she did come home when she did, because she fell ill with a scary virus and ended up losing her hearing in one ear and has been recovering and getting her strength back.

Corinne works hard for her salon, and has a busy packed schedule each week filled with clients, beyond her regular stylist schedule she puts in her hours just running the business and making sure her stylists get healthy doses of continued education. Regardless to say, that her going away for this long impacts her business. She is lucky to have understanding clients and a supportive staff, and it is the least I can do to try and help her by spreading the word. She has reluctantly asked for financial assistance, mainly so that this trip impacts the salon as little as possible. Her being gone obviously makes it so that the salon does not make as much money. It's a scary decision to make right now, but she has made the right one, go and keep her boy thriving.

Here is THE LINK to her Chipin page, and I have also placed her CHIPIN in my sidebar. Please consider reading on and maybe throwing a little her way if you have found yourself in the position to do so this year. Thanks a bunch for reading this far if you have, and if you are able to donate, thank you.

Corinne is getting set to leave soon, and you can follow her story over at Wheels-Up! as she returns to Ethiopia, to Addis Ababa, to the orphanage, to her son.

Bad Timing

2011-12-19T08:56:00.001-05:00

Without getting into a huge amount of embarrassing examples here, I have notoriously bad timing for things. The one example I wanted to focus on today was my new found "fitness rage" coinciding with one of the biggest months to shove sugar and junk in your face of the entire year. It's December-- duh. Why on earth would anyone decide to get in shape two weeks before X-mas?! My last post "Fighting" was made for the day after New Years Eve, not two weeks before X-mas chocolate and egg nog? What is wrong with me? I am sure more than a few people read that post and had to have thought to themselves: "Ummmmm, shut up asshole! I am not ready for this yet, there is a fried turkey and a port wine cheese ball with my name on it in a few days!!!" Anyone want to admit this? You can tell me to shut it. I know I'm early. I'm out here in the "I'm really going to do it this time" territory WAY too soon. I have to tell you, I'm excited for the NYE posts that are coming :)

This weekend Cole hosted a cookie party that she wants to become a family tradition for us. I was all about it. Not for the sweets, but for the fact that Cole wanted to get together some of the women in her life that are important to her and bake. It was all good until I started to realize how many cookies were being constructed. Until the house started to smell like butter and sugar. Until the dining room table looked like this!

photo by: Cole Marshall on iPhone 4s lovingly taken from her instagram

I'm not going to pretend that I didn't eat any of this mess. But I will tell you that I only ate a couple of these, and by a couple I mean 3. And by 3, I mean they were the 3 SMALLEST ones. It was freaking hard not to do what I always do and eat until I hear myself say: "Ugh, why did I do that?" How many people eat until they make themselves say something regretful and hilarious? It's hard. All of this is hard. It is fun to eat this shit, it is fun to make sweets. I wonder what Cole's family would have said if she was like, we're all going to make really yummy brussels sprouts to give to people. I know if someone handed me a box of brussels sprouts for a gift I would wonder what i did to hurt them that year.

So what can we do? How can we undo these traditions of indulgence? Is this how it started, these small occasions throughout the year bleeding into the every day? People deciding they want to celebrate every little victory with this X-mas indulgence as a blueprint.

I'm honestly not sure how I am going to navigate the next week. My plan is to say no as often as I can, and workout extra hard. What do the healthy people do? Are you all so healthy at this point that you can truly eat some of this stuff and have it not become an issue? If I were my trainer I would just make my arms and chest so sore that I can't use them to lift up triple layers of chocolate to my lips. "I'm sorry, that piece of cake is just way too heavy to eat."

All I know is that I just have to get through this last part of the month, and then the internet will be full of posts about weight loss and exercise, and all kinds of determination and spunk. Right now, I'm just saying shit that people don't want to hear right now. I will say this at the risk of being preachy...

If you are in a situation like mine, frustrated with how you feel and look, and wanting to finally do something about it, and planning for fitness right after the New Year. Think really hard about what you bring into your house for the holidays. Don't fill your kids stocking with gross amounts of candy that they will never eat, all of that will end up in your cupboards haunting you. Tempting you. Making it easy to fall off the horse when you finally get started. You will be tempted to gorge yourself on it, making the justification that you are getting rid of all the bad stuff before you start to get in shape. Consider telling your family and friends not to give candy this year, unless of course you have loads of willpower and discipline and are already in great shape, and have the ability to indulge once a year and treat yourself to treats, and then immediately go right back to your perfectly healthy lifestyle. If that's the case, than go nuts :)

It's just a thought. I just know how hard it is to get that stuff out of your house once it makes it in there.

I'm fine with my bad timing for now, it was funny once I realized how absurd it was that I was doing all this right now, but maybe that is the better idea, instead of on New Years Eve when all the damage is done, try and think about it now. Just a little bit. I will welcome the support after the holidays. I know it's coming.

Fighting

2011-12-16T08:05:00.002-05:00

It's an odd feeling at 37 to be in a situation where I am purposefully uncomfortable. At this age, I tend to not do things that would lead to face planting into the ground from exhaustion. So yesterday I'm staggering around a gym on legs turned to noodles and dust, just inches away from that fuzzy blackness luring me to fall into it. And I keep muttering to myself, this is all your fault, this is all your fault, this is all your fault. My body hates me.

Exercise is a conversation you have with your body, and if you have been feeding it well, and exercising often, the conversation goes great, a couple of old friends, pushing one another to new boundaries and unlocking new things it can do. WOW, look how far and fast I can run. WOW, look how high I can jump. But, when you feed it nothing but sugar cancer and lard, and stop using it almost entirely, when you lay it up to rest on couches and comfy chairs for years at a time, it's going to be really pissed when you start trying to use it again. And when you start pushing your body to do new things you're saying: "Oh hi, how have you been? How do you feel?" and your body sends a clear signal to let you know it's not happy about what you've done to it. In response it falls apart and quivers and pours sweat, and your heart jumps around your chest and tries to push you over. It's basically saying: "I feel like shit asshole, all you've done is sit around and feed me terrible food and all your muscles turned into mushy messy pudding, and now you expect me to do these things?" and then your body spits on you and in it's anger, starts to fall apart. It's so angry it can't function, it turns your lungs against you, it shakes your limbs, it squeezes your insides until they cramp, your body hates you.

Think about it like the couple that just quietly exists without any communication about what's bothering them. The couple you see at the diner, sitting in silence in their soup, with nothing to say, staring through one another, content with ignoring their differences and disgusts. Then one day, one says to the other, "I hate what you have become", and so they fight. They battle fiercely. All the sudden they are talking, really speaking to one another. They wake up and start unloading hard truths. The point is most people don't want to fight through the problems or what's hard. So they walk away, or they figure out how to justify the differences enough to go back to simply ignoring them, and they quietly exist, and continue to deteriorate.

When you are fighting to get something back, fighting to rebuild, fighting to make something brand new-- that is a brutal ugly nasty fight. It's long lasting, it's hard work, and it hurts, almost every day it hurts. That pain is supposed to remind me that it's starting to work. That pain is there to tell me that we are at least talking again, and these are all the places that need work. And then one day it just stops hurting so bad, and there is a friendship that begins to spark. A trust builds that we will be taking better care of one another from now on. These are just rumors I hear from people that have been fighting with their bodies and have new relationships with them. I hear they go new places, and get new clothes, and people say, "Look how great you look!" But I also hear that isn't the best part, it's how they feel inside, and what they feel like they can accomplish-- anything they want to.

Keep pushing for the life that you want.

A Few Things On My Mind

2011-12-15T08:29:00.000-05:00

** So I'm not sure how many people that read here are also fans of watching the reality series The Biggest Loser but Cole and I have been hooked for a couple of seasons now. The thing I find the most curious about the show is that about halfway through the episode, no matter how full I am feeling from dinner, We usually get up at some point and get into the freezer and eat some ice cream, or I'll pop a bag of popcorn and eat the entire thing. Anyone else find themselves doing things like this? What's the deal here?

** I wish someone would keep some stats on couples that choose the no shower route vs the couples that keep up the regular shower routine despite being tired and just wanting to sit and stare at walls for an hour to unwind. I want to know if the no shower people are having more sex than the shower people. Are the no shower people more productive during the day than the shower people? Do the shower people have more friends than the no shower people? I feel like these stats would blow minds apart.

** I quit using twitter a couple months ago and have been loving my internet life much more ever since. Anyone else make the leap and quit, and discover that this incredibly useful and essential social media tool really doesn't matter at all? You have to constantly feed that monster to make it work for you, and I have the feeling that there are way more people out there feeding it noise because they think they have to, compared to people truly enjoying the experience. I'm not denying that twitter can be powerful and amazing, I'm just saying it feels good to unplug from that drain. Curious if anyone else was experiencing this...

** Speaking strictly to any possible readers who also have a child with SMS, I was curious if you noticed an escalation in tantrums and bad behaviors during the winter months vs the summer months when the days are longer. Cole has picked up on this, and tracked a major swing in defiance and stubbornness in LB when the days get shorter. The less sunlight he is exposed to the more difficult he can be. Which of course is linked to the reversal of the circadian rhythm and melatonin levels in people with SMS. Really interested to know if other parents are experiencing the same thing. We have been so curious about trying light therapy and just starting to really look into it.

** Do most people still lie to their kids about Santa? Or is this considered one of those truly terrible things parents used to do, that just ins't cool anymore? Like spanking. And sticking soap in mouths.

** Thanks for the race suggestions yesterday, I think I have myself a great start to a team already, now we just need to settle on a race so I know what to train for. And so far I haven't seen one that quite fits the description I gave. I will keep looking at all the suggestions. Truly appreciated all of them. For now I am just going to keep getting into basic all around good shape, and then start worrying about specializing. I love the idea of needing a navigator on the team to make it. I am drawn to adventure racing. How is that for a midlife crisis? From Couch Potato to Adventure Racer wouldn't that be a miracle to pull off?

Team Sport Junky

2011-12-14T09:23:00.002-05:00

There are people like THIS guy, who just woke up one day and decided that he will go running every single day no matter what, even if he is hurt, and then he goes and runs for like 525 some odd days in a row-- without fail. And then there are people like THIS lady, who is told she is going to be on a marathon team and to go ahead and get ready, and by the way she has just 2 months and has never really trained to run before, and then she does, gets hurt, twice, possibly three times, runs it anyway, and still posts a rockin time.

And then there is me. Day one me.

Cole bought me 4 weeks with a personal trainer for my 37th birthday, and yesterday was my first day. So here I am sitting in bed, the day after workout one, laughing out-loud at how insane it is that my arms actually hurt to type this. Trying to figure out how to not walk like Frankenstein when I have a lunch later I am going to. I can see myself lurching up to greet my friends trying not to bend anything, and having to explain why I just want to order a water with a straw so all I have to do is lean forward to sip out of the glass.

This is the day after day one. How many people stop here? How many people beg their spouse to rub them down with a mix of Tiger Balm and Icy Hot and a little Ben-Gay thrown in just to he sure your body feels like it's on fire instead of a sea of ripped apart throbbing muscle? How many people decide that this whole idea of exercise is just stupid, and they will just eat better and go for light walks, and they don't need to feel muscle pain like this ever again? It would be amazing to document all of the conversations people have with themselves when they talk their way out of doing good things for their bodies. Nobody is more convincing than yourself: "Come on buddy, you don't want to feel this way, do you?" Seriously it would make for such a great read. Posters of out of shape and overweight people standing next to their quit speech. It's a whole new line of motivational posters.

Yesterday when I had to explain to my new trainer what I wanted, what my goals were, I must have sounded crazy. I was like: Well, is it possible to exercise so much that I can eat like I'm 13 years old again and just smoked like a bag of weed and bought myself a box of 12 chicken tacos and a bag of chips?! Is that possible? No? Well how about like once a week I can eat an entire pizza without having to worry about it? Geez! You're strict. Well, I guess I just want to look better so when people see how hot my wife is they don't spend the next 15 minutes trying to wonder why she is married to someone who looks so bad.

Of course I'm exaggerating here for laughs but I was really wishy-washy, like I honestly didn't know what my goal was. To live longer? Feel better? Look better? Everything I said came out like a question. In the end I decided that I needed to feel like I was training for something big! I always do better when I am a part of a team, I hate letting other people down. I've been letting myself down for 37 years, so I am immune to it. So I need to be in a situation where people are dependent on me to do well or they will lose out on something. That is the stuff that makes me a champion :) I am a team player.

Seriously. I need a goal. I watched this AWESOME trailer for THIS race, and immediately wanted to find something bonkers like this to work towards. I used to love that Eco-Challenge race they did. So hit me with links to adventure races, expedition races, and crazy endurance craziness that makes you crazy if you finish it. The kind of races where they drag people off the course on stretchers shaking and crying. And it would be cool if the race was somewhere out of the country in some exotic location that has bugs and snakes that can kill you with a bite, jungles that eat your skin off if you get a scrape. Something like that. Oh, and I need a team, and a sponsor to send me to this exotic adventure endurance race place. That's all I need. Then I will be totally fine. Imagine a team of bloggers running one of these races. Oh the stories.

Both of the people I linked to at the top of this post are written by people I look up to immensely, for more than just their psychotic determination and grit, but for the humor and perspective they are able to communicate so well in their story telling about the process of doing something that is hard for just about everyone else. They never lie and say it's a cake walk, but there is a glory in their achievements even when its centered around so much pain. It's like Rocky Balboa in round 15 wobbling around beat to hell and still standing. You love the guy for it. They could be on my team, they are both Rocky's. I can't imagine letting them down. Imagine the things they would say about me on their blogs if I turned out to be a quitter. The danger of being humiliated in a public forum, that's the kind of motivation I need. They would be so mean. I couldn't even use the fact that I was hurt as an excuse. Heather was running around Manhattan on a bad ankle for like an entire marathon.

All joking aside, send me your race suggestions. Just think, I would be the only runner sponsored by a 12 pack of chicken tacos. It will be amazing.

The View-- Christmas In NYC

2011-12-13T10:00:00.002-05:00

Let me catch you up... I had a couple jobs in New York City last week with some time off in between them, so I decided as a surprise at the last minute that I would bring up Cole & Tessa to soak up some Christmas sights and get touristy with me during my time off over the weekend. It was my only chance to try and keep some of our family tradition intact of going to see the Radio City Christmas show. The biggest bummer in making this decision was that we could not bring The Littlest Buddy with us because it was not our weekend to be with him, and I would be in and out working a bunch and that isn't an ideal amount of consistency to keep him coping with a big change like a trip to the Big Apple :(

All I told Cole was, you're going to NYC next weekend with Tessa and we're doing a bunch of stuff... a bunch. So the whole trip was a surprise for them. And who loves to give surprises? This guy.

all images taken on iPhone 4s and processed through instagram

This was one of those weird trips that felt too good to be true, when something would go wrong, someone would come along and make things better. It was starting to get freaky towards the end, but it happened a bunch, stuff like-- when some cruel kid hating B sitting next to us huffed and puffed, griped and groaned, and built up so much tension around us at a show, I got up and spoke to the floor manager and we were moved to amazing seats that were a million times better than the ones I had paid for where we had to sit next to a kid hater. So thanks for that you mean ass lady wherever you are. Who gets mad at a kid for being excited at Mary Poppins?! You're at Mary Poppins you ding dong!!!!

Here's another example: On the morning that Cole and Tessa were flying in I wanted to get the room all ready so they could settle in and warm up and relax a little before we set out for the day. So when I arrived to check in, this is the news I receive. "Your room isn't finished being cleaned, but we did go ahead and upgrade you to a loft." Im sorry you did what?! I was so afraid that if I spoke they would either change their mind, say just kidding, or I would somehow screw it up. So I just backed away slowly and nodded. They did end up getting the room ready by the time Cole and Tessa arrived, so we got to go straight up.

So in all of the planning of sights and sounds, and shows and spectacle, it ended up being the windows in our room that stole the whole show, and of course it was the one thing I had nothing to do with. The two of them rushed into the room and let out these great "WOWS!!" and ran right up to the windows and climbed up onto the sills and fawned over the view. Tessa was out of her mind excited. It really made the whole trip, right there in that moment. She stood in the windows for at least an hour just pointing and asking questions, and laughing. "What's that daddy?" I think she set a record and asked this same question 592 times standing in that window. It was awesome.

The above photos are the only pictures I took the whole weekend on my 7D, I mainly used my iPhone, and boy did I feel like a tourist whipping that thing out and squinting at the back of it composing shots in the middle of the street and at shows. So if you follow along on Insatgram or my Tumblr I am sure you saw all the NYC photos pouring in from the trip. I thought by now I would be tired of using the phone as my main walk around camera, but I am showing no signs of slowing down. I really love the convenience of it too much.

One last story from the trip- It's not often that I sit around and pat myself on the back about shit that I do, if anything I am so self critical that I'm usually a punching bag. But... last year when we took the kids to see the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular starring the World Famous NYC Rockettes, I noticed and paid close attention to where Santa Claus came out into the crowd and makes his march up to the stage for the show. So this year, I bought seats where I remembered him walking out, and sure enough, after the first dance number when Santa arrives in the theater, the big spotlight shoots down right at our corner, and BAM! there is Santa Claus standing right there, and I grab Tessa and hold her up in the air, and Santa walked right over (like it was his job or something) and picked her up and hugged her tight and says to her "Ho-Ho-Ho, I love you so much." in a perfect jolly Santa Claus voice and Cole and I were going bonkers. I must have looked like crazy Will Ferrell in Elf when he starts screaming and flapping his hands for Santa at the Dept Store. "OH My GOD Tessa it's Santa! SANTA!!!!!!! It was amazing. So for the next 20 minutes of the show I don't even remember anything that happened, I was too busy beaming and thinking to myself: you're the greatest dad in the world, I mean the greatest. Of course that wore off quickly and I immediately went back to my trademark panicked and self critical state where I constantly beat myself up. But those 20 minutes felt nice.

In my little opinion, nobody does Christmas like New York City, it really feels great to be in that city this time of year, and I am so beyond lucky that I got the chance to do this again this year. It's so important to me that the kids can look back on their lives and see that they have been places beyond their own neighborhoods. I'm sure Tessa won't remember that at the age of two she stood in a window and marveled over the view and the noise laid out in front of her, but she will have these stories and images to look back on, and I hope they always give her great courage to face the world.

Coffee Talk

2011-12-07T08:53:00.002-05:00

I get just a little time with Cole each morning before she goes off to work for the day. This morning while she waited for her coffee to brew she was reading emails, and instagram, and we had this discussion.

Cole: Don't post that picture you can see my panty line, my panty line is too personal.

Me: Sorry, it's already posted.

Cole: What if this Kepler-22b planet is really just heaven.

Me: Huh?

Cole: You know, what if it's heaven?

Me: Like God thought, I'll just put it way out here, 600 light years away, no way these ding dongs will ever find it?!

Cole: Yeah, and now here we are trying to figure out how to get there. Like we come along and bring the virus.

Me: What virus?

Cole: Us. We're the virus. Like you know if we figured out that we discovered heaven, someone would decide to go and invade it.

Me: This sounds like a movie.

Cole: Yeah, a good movie.

Me: Like we would be trying to get into heaven alive?

Cole: Sci-Fi

***

I thought sharing this morning conversation here, might give everyone something to talk about today. Kepler-22b throw that around the water cooler. It's a fun one.

Time-- And How I Got Okay About Not Having Any of It

2011-12-05T10:00:00.001-05:00

I'm going to be 37 tomorrow.

In the last few weeks leading up to this date, I've been thinking mostly about my state of happiness. Assessing and stacking up my successes next to my failures, as well as being brutally honest about my strengths and weaknesses as it pertains to checking off accomplishments and goals that I am striving for. I was happy to discover that things stacked up pretty well, however there was one set of stacks that were the most telling about my future, and it was the most troubling. It was when I took a look at my time vs my determination. It was the most unbalanced out of everything I had mulled over. A big towering stack of determination and a little teeny tiny pile of time. That was bad news for me.

if you have your time and determination purring in harmony, and on top of that plenty of it to wield at your will, there isn't anything that you can't do. I recently watched some short films on creatives that had dramatically changed the course of their lives after layoffs or setbacks. Some of them had just woke up one day and started being honest that they were miserable in their current fields, and then they did something about it. The one thing I noticed that they all had in common, was they had the time on their hands to do something about it. They mention frequently how much time it took them to get started, and how much time they put into making this thing they were after perfect. It's funny when you hear these kinds of success stories and it's centered around a single man or a single woman, they speak about how they tuned out their friends and a social life, cut themselves off, put themselves on an island, they put their heads down and solely went after what they wanted. When it is a similar success story about someone who has a family, all the talk is about support systems and how they couldn't have done it without their partner, their spouse taking over an entire aspect of their life for them so that this new achievement could be possible. They are given the gift of time.

Do you ever watch the Academy awards and feel really terrible when the actor or actress that's standing there sobbing over their trophy is going on and on about how they could never ever have done this without the sacrifice they made away from their loved ones? And then they show the crowd shot and you see their partner crying just as hard. I think about those tears and how complex it all is in that moment. There are for sure happy and proud tears pouring out, but along with it there has to be regret over missing one another, moments they will never get back of their kids growing up, an absence and a distance that has to be mended between all of them. It's always sad to watch, mostly because I think of the people that attempt this and that don't have the same successes, the people that can't hold up to the pressure of putting everything on the other persons shoulders. All the failed attempts that lead to resentments and families breaking up over the promise of results-- "if you just sacrifice everything for me, I can do this great thing!" and then they don't. It's brutal.

I don't want to be in the position where after achieving my goals, and I am relishing the feeling of accomplishment, look back on how I was able to pull it off, and realize it was because I gave up the one thing that I have done right so far. I'm about to be 37 and just now figuring out that I have everything I ever wanted in my personal and romantic life, and that isn't anything I want to gamble with. Having that personal happiness and balance takes just as much work and time to maintain as it does to balance a career. It isn't effortless, and anyone that says it is either is lying or lying. It is work.

Something my mother beat into my head when I was a kid, and this is definitely filed under the "maybe she shouldn't have said shit like this to me when i was a kid" folder, but she said: "It's possible to not be able to stand someone you love." and then she would kind of look at me like, "you know what I mean... you know?!" and then nudge me with her elbow. Basically this was her telling me I was a huge annoying asshole of a teenager, which I absolutely was. My point is, knowing that this is possible-- I don't ever question Cole's love for me, but I'm not fool enough to think that love protects me from being hateable or annoying.

I think where this has led me is despite my drive to live a creative life, I have to find a way to not react to the frustration of how much longer it's going to take me to get to where I want to be since I am unwilling to bury my head and work possessed by the end goal. I have too many other people to consider. So it's time I let go of it as a frustration. It cannot become a regret. I will not let it turn into resentment. I don't have the time that other people have. I didn't start this when I was 17. I started this when I was in my thirties and had a family and it was already too late. So of course it's going to take longer. duh.

Each year I get a little older, and each year I try and let go of something in my life that will allow me to move forward with some more grace.

So this year, I am going to relax about the time tables. I have the love of my life and hilarious beautiful creative children surrounding me, and they keep me magnetized and pulled close to them, and so if that means that it's going to take longer to get to where I want to be, that's fine. I am getting there with good company, and in good standing with all of them. In the end, we won't be strangers when we get there. Together.

A Follow Up to the Slobs Post

2011-12-02T22:09:00.003-05:00

If you've been putting off buying yourself some new pillows and maybe a new comfy warm blanket for the winter, do yourself a favor and go and treat yo self!

Have a great weekend.

The Season is Ripe with Forgiveness

2011-12-02T08:40:00.000-05:00

I've written recently about my new obsessive love for the fabulous blogging combo of Instagram to Tumblr. I mean it's the best. Just the best. Really it is. But not until last night has anything I have posted on Tumblr really ever been Tumbled before. It wasn't an adorable photo of the kids, or anything clever that I wrote, it was a cool quote I found by my man Fred Rogers, more affectionately known as Mr. Rogers.

This was the quote:

Forgiveness is a strange thing. It can sometimes be easier to forgive our enemies than our friends. It can be hardest of all to forgive people we love. Like all of life’s important coping skills, the ability to forgive and the capacity to let go of resentments most likely take root very early in our lives

He's so noncommittal there at the end of that... It was really the trueness of that line "It can be hardest of all to forgive people we love." that got me thinking about forgiveness and led me to post that.

Within seconds of posting it, people were hitting the like button and reblogging it, and I realized just how relevant it was for the season. Duh, it was Dec 1st, and more than anything else this is the time of year people are gearing up to forgive the people they are supposed to love so that they can stand to be around one another over the holidays. It's a sad circle really, people muster up the gumption to let go of grudges and put differences aside, and reach out to one another in the spirit of the season, they dig deep and really make an attempt to make the necessary repairs to their broken relationships. However, by the time New Years is over, most people in this situation have come to realize after spending so much time with this person or people, that they were right in the first place, they are still a HUGE asshole. The feelings almost always mutual, and they all go back to hating one another until next December. They say things like: "I just can't figure out how to forgive them for the way they make me feel." and there are lots of those annoyed grunting sounds.

And despite these yearly failed attempts at forgiveness, they just keep failing... year after year.

But thank god they didn't have to feel guilty over the holidays. Would we really rather be miserable than feel guilty? I mean think of that choice. Miserable from guilt, or misery from being around someone you find insufferable. Why are we so afraid of guilt? It seems to weigh the most-- Guilt is like this snarling fat-assed 4 armed loudmouth monster bully that knocks you over, sits on your chest, and then pins you down and takes turns slapping your face with its four hands and won't leave you alone about what a jerk you are for hurting other peoples feelings. With each smack it reminds us of how sad we are making other people by our behavior. It says something biting and true towards our obvious selfishness to not consider someone else.

It seems that old haunty Guilt comes to town way more than jolly Saint Nick ever has. My feeling is that if your motivation to mend and forgive is solely to avoid the Guilt Monster, then you're making a bad choice. If you have truly felt forgiveness in your heart and you can take the time to reconnect, than that is a gorgeous thing, and it's what truly makes this time of year magical for some people. I love that about this season, it really can be powerful enough to bring people back together, it gives us glimpses at humanity that we often don't see the rest of the year. Forgiveness is possible. Why do you think I sob at the end of every Home Alone ever made? Because that little brat and his mom have the ultimate forgiveness hugout at the end of the movie, and I wish it was me standing there. I don't think the success of that movie franchise has much to do with the relentless beatings Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern take, I'm pretty sure it's the gratuitous display of forgiveness at the end. We see that it's possible to come back and find one another again, the child like feelings of uncluttered love. That embrace, people long for it to be true again. That whole movies message is "I love you no matter what, despite all the offensive and shitty things you just did. Merry Christmas."

For every person that's excited to go home for Christmas, there is someone else who is terrified and dreading it. One can't relate to the other. I hear people say, "I would rather be miserable than alone over Christmas." How many people in this situation ever consider mending their relationships with being alone? Maybe try and fix that first. It's probably a more manageable feat than finding new commonalties and bonds with broken friendships and family. I have heard claims that the people most successful in relationships are the ones that figured out how to be alone and love who they are when they're flying solo way before they ever got into a relationship with someone else. What if this is 100% true? Who actively tries to love being alone? Most people are running around trying to figure out how to never end up this way. It's been beaten into us that it's the worst thing you can be, completely by yourself. We have this terrible picture ingrained into us that if you're alone, it must be because something is wrong with you.

You know what's really hard to do by yourself? Feel guilty.

For whatever reason, the fear of feeling guilty makes us do and tolerate things that shouldn't be done or tolerated. I know of situations where others have allowed themselves to be put into harms way, and endure unspeakable abuse, just because they would rather not feel the guilt of making someone else feel rejected or alone. Here is the deal, if you think someone is crummy and cruel and you hate the way they treat you, a sale at the Mall, and twinkle lights, and cocoa isn't going to change any of that.

So instead of worrying about the guilt this year, I say try a year where you break the cycle, don't reach out to people that you know are wrong and have hurt you in the past. Break the cycle this year. What if that is the very thing that brings on actual forgiveness?

When was the last time you enjoyed the holidays? Maybe this year make it a point to have a face off with Guilt and battle that monster off your chest and out of your business. Surround yourself solely with people that inspire you, support you, love you for who you are. Don't buy presents for anyone that makes you feel bad. Don't sit in church if you don't believe in God, don't have people into your home that make you hurt. You have 23 days from right now, to figure out how to make this holiday feel good for you and your loved ones. These are your memories to make, and they shouldn't be dictated by people that make you feel bad.

For me, it took me my entire adult life to figure out that when I am around my parents, I need to remember that I like how I turned out. If I do this, there is nothing that can be said that can hurt my feelings or get me down. At the risk of sounding like Stewart Smalley-- I like me. And no matter what, my parents had a huge amount to do with who I became, whether they encouraged or discouraged, they put me on the paths that led me to this life, and I have a good one. So it makes me appreciate them in ways I never could before. They loved me. That's an incredibly difficult thing to do for some people, and with the kind of teenager I was, my parents are saints for sticking by me.

Parents suggest, and nudge, and push, and in turn we embrace or resist, but either way they put us in motion to find ourselves. That's enormous power and they wielded it the best they could, are we doing any better? I think it tends to sneak up on everyone that has ever been a parent. All the sudden you're standing there in front of your own children and you're thinking, I'm never going to make the mistakes that my parents made, and then you realize, well there it is again, your parents continued influence on you. They are still leading you down paths. They made the mistakes ahead of us, and now we are making our very own, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so the story goes. All we can do is our best, and the hope for me is that I can recognize my mistakes as they are made and keep the kids on paths that will always lead back to love.

Forgiveness.

Proud

2011-12-01T07:10:00.001-05:00

A few days ago while Cole and I were busy in the kitchen, Tessa was keeping herself busy playing. She was deep into something good, because she wasn't in the kitchen getting under our legs the whole time. I couldn't see what she was doing, but I could hear her giving instructions: "You sit here" and "you here." and then she would follow with: "like that. Good!"

"Say cheese. Oh! That's good."

We kept hearing her say "cheese" and then I would hear the toy camera going off.

I walk into the living room and saw the magic she had created-- she went and fished Woody and Jesse out of the toy box, and had posed them neatly on the couch, holding hands and everything, and was now taking pictures of them, stopping in between shots to give instructions and compliments. I was most impressed that she actually found their little hats, and had placed them appropriately on top of their heads. This went on for awhile. She had herself a couples portrait session, and she didn't need any help at all from me. From what I could tell she was very professional and fun to work with, the only problem I noticed was that she had the camera facing the wrong way most of the time, but she did eventually figure that out.

All I had handy was my iPhone to document this moment, and only managed two shots before she stopped what she was doing when she realized I was shooting her scene out. Photographers HATE it when people steal their shots, and really don't like someone shooting over their shoulder.

So yeah, I'm going to guess that she is going to be taking prettier more thoughtful photos than me by the time she is 4 if she keeps this up. So proud of her.

Staying Out of Their Friendship

2011-11-29T08:35:00.001-05:00

Growing up my sister and I were enemies. Not merely bickering siblings, we were the worst kind of advisories, we worked against one another, furiously and with intention to harm, it was a famous hatred that our friends and family knew about well. There was no hiding it. As an adult it's one of those regrets that just stick in my ribs, it's a dull shitty pain that isn't going anywhere, we are fine to one another now-- manage pleasant conversations, laugh, it's nice when we do make the time to talk. She has a cool life, great kids, happy marriage. I enjoy our talks when we have them. But... I'm afraid that we will never be truly close like a brother and sister are meant to be close. It was the kind of damage that can't be undone, we can forgive one another for the past, and we have, but the forgiveness doesn't replace the time we lost, it doesn't forge a bond like: watching out for one another, keeping secrets and sharing whispers, shaking from belly laughs, these are the things that tie you together tightly. Some people want to go back and be a kid again so they can raise hell and eat candy and play all day, I just want to go back and be my sister's friend.

As terrible as that memory is of my relationship with my sister, remembering how sad it made my mother and father is almost more unbearable to conjure up. They wanted us to be friends and love one another so very badly. They pleaded with us. It hurt them. Looking back on things now, I believe that was a big part of the problem, seeing them upset about our resistance to our bond was a lot of power to be wielding as a kid. It was an easy way to get a rise out of them. I was especially bad, it was like blood in the water, if I saw an emotional response to something I did, I went after it. I was a monster. Truly.

Enough about that.

So of course now, armed with lessons learned and my regrets, I have been hyper sensitive to the budding relationship between Tessa and The Littlest Buddy, it's something I keep my eyes on, but my mouth shut about. I promised myself that I wouldn't instruct them that they're supposed to be friends and that they are to love one another. In fact I don't think I have ever suggested it. Cole and I both have taken a real hands off approach to their bonding after LB got over his initial month long freak out that Tessa even existed. We were convinced he was never ever going to chill out. I mean that kid was pissed, top the emotional rage off with the genetic disorder and we were worried. Real worried.

I wonder what Tessa thinks of her brother, how is she coming to understand him, how does learning to communicate with someone who is largely non-verbal work when you're just learning to talk yourself? Would she understand him when he does speak? Would she bite her hand when she got upset as well? Would she tantrum when faced with an unexpected change in the days routine? Does she feel our stress? Will she resent the amount of attention he requires? What does LB think of Tessa, does he understand that she is growing and learning new things every day? Yeah, I could keep writing questions like this for ten pages. There is always too much to think about.

We leave them alone about their relationship. It's their friendship to navigate and nurture, not ours. We enforce the basics, no hitting, no pushing, don't be a jerk, that kind of stuff. I can say for certain, that it has been my greatest joy as a parent so far to see their friendship grow naturally. Cole and I will hear laughter from the other room, and realize they are playing together, they found a way to play. You have no idea what a relief this is. LB's Smith Magenis Syndrome has kept him at a distance from almost all other kids, so why would Tessa be any different? Why would she want to play with him? But she does, it took them awhile, but they have figured out how to make the other laugh. We see kindness from LB constantly towards her. She drops her milk from her high chair at dinner and he gets up to rescue it: "Here ya go Tessa." and she responds, "oh thank you."

This has been a slow build, they pretty much ignored one another for two years. And just recently over the last few months we have seen their little relationship really take off. On the days when LB is at his fathers, Tessa will look for him when she wakes up, and continues to ask for him throughout the day. When she paints she always includes a little blob of paint that represents him, he is always included. Hearing them playing off in another room together literally caves my chest in, it feels so good. I keep this secret from them, I don't want them to know how important it is to me, I am of the belief that kids shouldn't know what's important to us emotionally, because as soon as we take something away from them and it hurts, they will try and do the same to us. Maybe that's not true, but I know that's who I was.

So for now. We have two brand new friends on our hands. And I love it, and I hope that from the love we pour onto them, they will just follow our lead. This all feels so complicated, and simple all at the same time. Right? People say: You just love them with all your heart, sounds simple enough right? But somehow all of this is still freakin hard.

owners of just one iPad, you know things are going good when they are happy to share this thing.

****

A few weeks ago we were driving to my father in laws house, and all of the sudden from the back seat the two of them start playing together. Taking turns being silly. Hearing them play and bond is the best, no matter what they're doing. It was the grossest music to our ears ever....

Total pals.

And of course we know, that this is just funny and beautiful to us.

** I wanted to post this, because for me helping to raise a special needs child it's always comforting to hear about positive and strong relationships amongst siblings. Any time that I see a post where there are strong bonds between brothers or sisters who have special needs I get a great big sigh of relief. For us it is imperative. We need to know that long after Cole and I are gone from this earth, that as an adult LB will have people around him that love him and care for him. It's frightening to imagine him not having anyone. So for anyone that stumbles across this blog from searching SMS, I hope that this post helps a little.

Currently During Nap Time

2011-11-28T08:18:00.002-05:00

Polaroid 600SE with Fuji 3000B

Lately on Cole's days off, when the kids go down for their nap, she heads straight for the garage, and dives into her new passion project -- She picked up two 1970's his and hers Raleigh Sport bikes and has been slowly bringing them back to life, one nap at a time.

Something that has always been a strong link in our compatibility is the fact that we can both pour ourselves completely into a project when we have free time. We both completely understand what it means to have hobbies, and their direct connection to sanity. I've really enjoyed watching her figure out how to piece this bike apart and get it shiny and new again. She will get stuck at a point, clean her hands up, grab her phone, google some stuff, watch 3 or 4 videos, read a forum, and then she is right back at it. It's quite incredible what can be done to rust with some water and a piece of aluminum foil. She has practically brought the bikes chrome back to brand new with her old tooth brush and some aluminum. She hasn't touched the bike with a single bit of metal polish at this point, and it already looks great.

This weekend she really went to town on these bikes, and even had Tessa and I helping at some point. It was a gorgeous weekend, a high of 77, shorts and tanks are still being worn, we had the house open, the football game on, grease on our hands, and we even sat in the garage and drank an ice cold beer and messed around with tools and talked shop. Incredible.

Once these two bikes are all a sparkle again, she is going to outfit them with a few new bells and whistles, but it's undecided if these are keepers or not, this pair of bikes might be headed for the classifieds.

iPhone 4S

Polaroid 600SE with Fuji100C

Canon 7D with 85mm 1.8

Slobs

2011-11-22T07:00:00.003-05:00

Currently there are four pillows in this bed, one is covered in that freaky medicated old person smell of Tiger Balm, one may or may not have been peed on by Tessa, one is the wimpy pillow that vaporizes to a thin flat sheet as soon as you put weight onto it, and then there is the good one. Cole has the good one right now. At least we think so. It could very well be the pee pillow because that one is pretty solid as well, but if you hit the wrong spot with your face, well... it smells like urine. We think. It's just a theory. Can't be sure.

Pillows are like seven bucks at IKEA... but the thought of actually leaving the house to go and purchase pillows that would make our life a little nicer at nighttime is unthinkable to me. I was faced with this decision recently, and I'm like: "We can't just throw these out!! They're our pillows." Either I have formed some crazy sentimental attachment to these things, or I have a deep rooted obligation to not be wasteful. How long are you supposed to keep pillows for anyway? I know people who have pillows from when they were kids still. Which is totally gross to me, because I know the crazy stuff I was doing to my pillows when I was a teenager and well... gross.

I can't think of a reason more terrible to have to leave the house. I mean we have four of these big nice looking from far away pillows. Why do I want to drive down I-4 to the IKEA to walk around that giant ass showroom to buy more of these? I like to think that my day has more priority to it. Making free time to go and buy pillows? Who does this? It's not like Milk. We have to have Milk.

Friend: "Whatcha doin today Ryan?"

Me: Oh you know, I have to go down to the Ikea and buy some pillows. They're like seven dollars there!!"

You know you can't really wash a seven dollar pillow, they turn into a mess, the stuffing separates and clumps up, so the weight of the clumps hang down to one side of the pillow, kind of like a ball sack. When you put your head on the good end it just squishes to the other side, like those crazy water balloon toys "water snakes" that you can't hold onto. Those things were like hand-job training for kids, seriously questionable toys.

So instead, it was decided that we should get these pillow cases off of them, and get things smelling good again on the outside. So the cases were stripped off, and been sitting in the mound of non-priority dirty laundry, and it has now become even more difficult to figure out which pillow has the piss on it.

Enough with the pillows.

Our house is like most houses with young kids in them, there is the clean section, where we entertain company, and trick visitors and family into thinking, "aww, what a cute little house." It's the side you see in all of the pictures. Clean floors, things are put away. And then there is our end of the house. The disaster. Where everything we neglect and put off exists in piles of junk and clutter. But, for every piece of filthy laundry, or halloween candy wrapper on the floor, it represents a few extra minutes of free time we had to play with the kids that day, or it's extra time for me to work on a blog post, or to stay on top of The Walking Dead, or for Cole to sit and pull hair out of her eyebrows. So it's tough to decide if this mess on this end of the house really makes me all that bothered. This mess is the spoiled brat side of ourselves that still thinks its cool to NOT have to clean your room. Im about to be 37 and I still think having a messy room is totally burning my parents. BURN!!!!

This mess, is the reason we continue to have the time we have to talk for a couple of hours at night. Sure you can talk while you clean up back here, but it doesn't feel as good as it does when you close the doors to the kids rooms at bedtime, and just completely turn to sloth. We melt into lazy soft butter. So this mess just keeps growing while all that good feet-up relaxing is going down. I just decided. I'm fine with it. It's just this one room.

****

We have the worst mattress money can buy right now, because when we got married we were broke jokes, and so we went for a really cheap king size over a decent queen. We were greedy pigs. Hey! Anyone reading here about to get married-- buy a good mattress. Trust me. Don't go for the really big one that's irresistibly cheap, go for the one that won't cripple you.

So anyway, back to our shitty mattress, because it's so terrible we have to switch sides every 3 nights, because I'm like 150 thousand pounds heavier than Cole who weighs as much as a roll of quarters. My side smashes all the fluff onto her side of the bed, and she sleeps on a rock about 2 feet higher than me, and I am drowning in a pile of mushy lumps that screw my back up. Hence the smelly tiger balm all over the pillows. Ugh the circle of life.

So when ever we make the side switch like we did tonight, I always end up with the night stand that she has had rights to for the past few days. I just checked things out, was looking for a spot to put my phone down. Don't worry, there wasn't a spot. Right now, for some reason, there is a box of Reynolds Freezer Paper on it, a wad of jewelry, some junk mail, a remote for our fan, and an empty big ass 3 ring binder. Tomorrow I will wake up and scoop all of this up and dump it on top of our dresser, right on top of the piles of the other collections of junk that get displaced whenever we switch sides.

I look at this mess and it is the very last place I have where I have clung onto my youthful laziness, and the clock is ticking. This won't last forever. The kids are going to get older, and soon Cole and I will have to suck it up, clean up our pig sty so that we can tell the kids that they have to clean up theirs. So until that day. We will continue to let the mess pile up in exchange for the extra minutes of play and silliness we get to have because of our slobiness.

Oh yeah, any friends or family reading this post that were wondering what might make for a nice Christmas present this year... How about some pillows. I hear they're like seven bucks down at the IKEA.

The Press

2011-11-21T09:10:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite things about Sesame Street growing up, besides Cookie Monster, were the short films that played during an episode that were centered around the production process of something delicious or curious. I loved getting to see how the things on the grocery store shelves ended up there. I'm not sure if they still do this on Sesame Street any longer, but I hope they do. Of course it would require Americans actually having jobs where they make things. Do you remember them, the films? It would be a little 2 minute film about something like an orange grove and how orange juice is made, and a group of kids would narrate these things, and just randomly scream stuff like, "ORANGE JUICE" as the oranges would get pulverized. They would do films about where crayons come from, or how peanut butter is made, chinese noodles.... stuff like that. I loved all of them, and they are strongly ingrained in my memory, and I was always fascinated by them growing up. They were strong little propaganda films, because by the age of 8 I wanted to wear a hair net and work in a factory.

So...

A couple months back I went to Hadley, MA on a job to make a book trailer for Storey Publishing on a new title about sewing, (which at first I was like, Sewing?! How do I? and then it turned out to be such a great project after talking to the authors. Can't wait to show you the results.) And while I was there, not only did I fall in love with all of Western Mass, but I met a family that were in the midst of the exciting final stages of launching their new apple cider business. We took a quick trip up the north-west slope of Mount Warner in North Hadley, Massachusetts to a barn, and in that barn was this fully restored and most splendid apple press that I was told was well over 100 years old. It looked brand new again, magnificent candy apple red, bright shiny piece of mechanics, gears and pulleys, and blades. It was one of those contraptions that I immediately wanted to see in action. I was a kid again. Randomly screaming, "Apples!!"

So I went back. Cole and I took a trip back to Hadley, and we were invited to the very first pressing of the season, and we were lucky enough to get to document this process. It was the first time I had just decided to make something for myself, just because, and it was the first time that Cole was on hand to assist me. So this exercise really woke something up inside me. I was like... THIS!!! This is what I want to do more of. With her. I loved working with Cole on this.

The music was provided with permission by the insanely talented Rickolus who has made his album American Backyard free for download over at his place HERE.

As you can see from the video, Carr's Ciderhouse is a family run business, and while I was filming I couldn't help but get choked up thinking about how cool it was when their little boy asked for that apple rake, and his dad just handed it to him without hesitation and let him start helping. I just know as a kid, it was moments like that, moments of inclusion and trust that really stuck with me and shaped who I became. It was awesome to see this moment. Father and son moments really kill me.

So if you are curious for more info about the actual Cider press and this family run business, Nathan from the ridicuoulsy gorgeous online magazine Kinfolk is giving this little film a home today on his site. So take a jump on over to Kinfolk and check the post (that will be up later today). If you have not heard about Kinfolk yet, do yourself the good favor of taking some time to look around some. I don't think you will regret it.

If you are now thirsty for cider, you can take a look at the family's web site that is in the process of being constructed, they are still in the just opening up for business stages, and it's an exciting time for them. If you live near Hadley, or Northhamptom you can pick some up for yourself right now. More info is being added to their site. If you are not near Western Mass, you can contact them through the site and try and strong arm them into selling you some cider. Tell them you saw the video, and say pretty please, it might work. Take a look HERE.

And a huge thank you to this really amazing family, who not only shared this special experience with us, but extended inspirational amounts of hospitality and warmth to us. They absolutely gave southern hospitality a run for its money. I'm not sure I have ever felt more welcome anywhere. So thank you to Jonathan and Nicole we hope to see you again soon. There is always Lego Land :)

Prep

2011-11-18T13:02:00.001-05:00

Cole practicing her Grape Leaf rolling skills

Next week starts the food madness... we are happily preparing ourselves this year. Last year we made Turkey Burgers and pretty much skipped the entire holiday. I'm not going to lie, it was nice to take a holiday pass from the stacks of traditional food over eating. This weekend we will be figuring out our menu, and our schedule. We have to do the rounds, how many dinners can we hit up in one day? So yes, there is much to plan.

This time of year always gets me a little sad, and I know I'm not the only one. The holiday blues is a real thing that does terrible things to an ego. I have always tried my best to find something good I can do for others, and in return that sadness moves to the back of my head space whenever I do. It doesn't go away, it's just maybe not on top of me so much.

This weekend I am going to include this into all of my plan making. Think extra hard what I can do for someone that will make a real difference this holiday season.

Happy planning.

The Best Most Terrible Weekend Together Ever

2011-11-17T01:15:00.001-05:00

The thing about planning a romantic trip, is that you're planning on actually feeling romantic during it. You can't plan for that? Can you? Is this really true? I mean, is it like a focus thing? Like you can psych yourself up for it... I am trying to picture a dude getting all pumped up before he dead lifts 300lbs over his head, spitting into his hands and taking intense quick breathes that kind of make that whistle sound like adorable old men do when they say their S's, but instead of a lift, he is thinking: "Man I'm going to be SO romantic tonight!!! I'm going to have sparkle eyes and everything. Let's do this!"

I can't remember the last time I felt romantic on demand. All of the romance in our marriage has come from the tiniest of moments that had nothing to do with the usual trappings of romance, and the greatest thing I have going for me, is that I don''t have a wife that lets these real moments pass her by because she has it set in her head that romance comes tied to flowers, and candles, and chocolates, all riding in on the sweet sounds of Billy Ocean. Im not saying that she wouldn't get swept away by some Billy Ocean and some rose petals, I'm just saying that it's nice that the romance has always been spontaneous and born from the super sexual lust we still have for one another despite how bad we smell from not showering for days at a time.

It was our second night of the "romantic" trip we just took, we were in our romantic room, after our romantic meal, and I had just showered so I could blow my nose really hard into my hands because I was so clogged up I sounded like a muppet, and I got into bed, I think HBO was on, all romantic hotels have HBO, and all the sudden she stopped my hand short just after I broke the underwear plane and she says, "No, I don't want to have an orgasm tonight, it hurts too bad to breathe. No touching that! get away from it."

Wait.

Let me back up.

Cole and I recently went to Western Mass, the Berkshires, The Hill towns, a place I have quickly fallen head over heels for, and a place I recently blogged about HERE. They should make post cards that say: "Fucking Gorgeous" across them in fine Helvetica placed carefully over pictures of anything you point a camera at there. Love this part of the country. Love. It.

It was a quick trip. day one was just for us, exploring, oohing and ahhing over foliage, and sugar shacks, and apple trees, and adorable small towns that you want to stop and make friends in and stay there forever. And day two was to make a film of something I thought was beautiful. More on that some other time. I have to get back to the romance here.

We were sick. Real sick. When we returned home from this vacation, Cole immediately went to the Doctor and opened her mouth and the guy flinched and said, "ugh, that isn't supposed to look like that at ALL." Great bed side manner right? But what can you do, we are the uninsured, and so you get the clowns in walk-in-clinics that recoil when they see gross swollen throats filled with strep throat. Cole had the strep. And apologies to anyone and everyone in Western Mass that got her germs. I have no idea how I didn't get this. I attribute it to the fact that I had my own set of gross things happening the entire time that kept us about 10 feet away from one another at all times.

During the day we were pretty decent. We ran around, laughed, played, and kept saying: "Look at that one!" and pointing at a tree. The feeling like complete dog shit part of being sick somehow lays low during the day, but as soon as the sun sets, and you want to get "romantic," the sick decides to turn on fevers that soak through shirts and beds with sweat, and plug noses with snot, and burn your throat so bad you don't even want to breathe.

I don't snore. unless I get drunk. Which isn't often. Anymore. Besides this last weekend at Cole's work party. Ugh. Save that for another post.

But guess who snored so obnoxiously loud on this trip that he kept his fever sick wife awake all night? THIS GUY!!! There is nothing more romantic than that is there?

So now that I have established the sickness. Lets get to the part where I was forced to have sex, because we were on a romantic trip...

Have you ever been to Disney World and you see that family, the family that despite the shitty time they are obviously having, keeps insisting to one another that they better have fun. The "You better enjoy this, it was expensive" family.

Cole kind of turned into that person on night two. It was our last night of the trip, last night away from the kids, away from real life, we were out in the world, in a hotel, we had packed 20 condoms, the good kind, that don't smell bad.

Cole informs me at dinner: "We're doing it tonight." She says this while she is shuddering from trying to swallow a spoonful of french onion soup that she could barely swallow down (strep throat), at this really cool tavern, in this great old hotel, next to a glowing brick fireplace, with the cutest old lady in a cardigan working as the hostess that I wanted to be my grandma.

"For sure. We HAVE to" she says.

"We're going to."

I had my orders.

It's a short walk back to our room. Both nights, Cole is so frozen from the cold that she is literally shiver shaking. So like a real hero, I turn the heat on to like 79 and blast it until she says she isn't cold. We are both so hot now, we have to open the windows and let the room get cold again, and we end sleeping with the air conditioner on, and the window open, with the covers kicked off of us, sweating, and oh yeah-- I'm snoring.

Wait.

The sex.

So the sex we HAD to have.

It was terrible. It barely happened and by barely it was the first time I have ever done it where the point was to stay as far away from one another as possible. Don't put your face near my face, It hurts my entire head to move from all the sinus pressure, so I can't move, No. YOU have to be on top. why does my entire body ache?

Of course all of this was being said while it was happening. It was like every few seconds someone was saying: "ouch, stop it."

And then I snored.

***

The trip to Mass has provided Cole and I with so much comedy, and so many chances to laugh about how life tends to work in these so not very fair ways, that the romance has come in droves ever since, our suffering has paid off. I am so lucky to have someone that thinks all of this is so funny. I feel like any moment we share, no matter what the setting and circumstances are, that I can look at Cole and think-- "God, I love her" that moment becomes romantic. Most of these moments happen every day, right here at home. From the smallest of things.

There isn't any magic place or trip that will top that feeling. I don't think you can plan for romance. For me they came from the smallest moments: When we turned around and drove back up the mountain so she could see her first apple tree, on the side of the highway in a patch of woods that were glowing yellow from the fall canopy, wanting to stop at all the "scenic view" spots to peep through old school 25cent viewers, leaning over railing in a pigsty together marveling over piglets, sitting in grass sipping on cider at sunset after she helped me film. All the charming hotels and "fancy" dinners just got in the way.

Lessons learned.

P.S. I am almost finished tinkering around with the little film Cole helped me make while we were in Hadley. Will have it up around here soon.

Taking The Same Picture in the Same Spot

2011-11-15T21:37:00.000-05:00

Hi.

HERE is a post from one year ago that you should totally take a look at.

Oh my.

We just spent the last few days over on the East Coast at The Wakulla Suites on Cocoa Beach. The weather was great. The pool was warm. The company terrific. As soon as I heard we were going back to the Wakulla Suites for the Alchemy Christmas party again this year, I knew I wanted to take a portrait of Tessa in the same spot as I did last time. I am just a sucker for a series I guess.

That little boy snuggling up to Tessa, is the amazing baby Leo, who some of you might remember from HERE.

Have some videos to share here soon. Film has been sent off to the lab. I miss my blog. I miss this space. That was the point of the break.

See you all soon.

In the Woods in Goshen

2011-11-08T11:03:00.003-05:00

Consider this the first in many follow up post to "Finding Cole"

We found this little patch of gorgeousness along the side of the road near the city limit of Goshen, MA we were driving to the Berkshires to see the ass end of Fall. There wasn't much left after the freak snow storm that buried much of the North East last week. So when we saw this patch of woods we parked and ran around like a couple of ding-dongs, pointing and shouting, "look at that one! oh wow, look at this one!!! Look over here."

I love this smile on Cole. This little patch of woods became one of our most favorite places we have ever been. Side of the road in Goshen, MA. Who knew?! If you're not following along on Instagram, I updated the new Tumblr site with vacation pics.

P.S. Cole and I went to Hadley, MA together while we were on this trip to make a video of a family business we fell in love with. Will be back to share that soon. It was the first time I have ever made time to just go off and make something just for the sake of making something that I thought was cool. I need to make this habit.

Finding Cole

2011-10-21T08:34:00.000-04:00

If you have bothered to venture over to my new Tumblr site you will see that it's been hard for me to put down the new iPhone and pick up any other camera. I am absolutely loving photo blogging this way, it feels effortless, and in some ways realized that it is way more personal and revealing than anything I used to write here. The Tumblr is here to stay and I FINALLY found a way to have Cole easily blog with me. So we are both contributing to All the Love in the Universe, and it has filled up fast with our life. She even thought up a clever way to show off some of what she does at the salon. The girl is handy with an iPhone that's for sure. I had a real actual moment where my mind was blown, sparks and smoke were sizzling out of ears, and my jaw was dropped open on the floor as I thought about how far these camera phones have come. I thought ahead to just two upgrades from now, and really truly believe that if they can ever figure out a real solution to some kind of reliable sharp zoom feature on a camera phone, the ol' point and shoot walking around camera industry is in for some hard times. Real hard times. Now if you could just custom set your white balance.

So far my official review for the iPhone 4S is this: They put an amazing camera on a terrible phone... I'm hooked.

Anyway, what am I doing writing in here?! I'm not supposed to be doing that. The truth is old habits die hard, and every morning, no matter what I told myself, I would wake up, and open up this dashboard, hit new post and stare at a blank screen and wonder why I couldn't write anything. This morning I just felt like talking I guess. I feel better. Why? Well because I have been spending more time with Cole.

So last week Cole and I had to get a babysitter for a few hours to go to a meeting, and after that meeting, we decided to go have a beer before we got home since we had some extra time. We only stayed out for an hour together, but in that hour I realized how badly I needed this kind of interaction outside of the house. It was in this hour that I realized a big reason for my quiet here, is that I don't like just talking about the kids and family life all the time, that a big part of this blog was about my relationship with Cole and how insistent we were on keeping hold of our identities. We both have our careers going where we want them, and we have our family, but what about our relationship? Whoops, we forgot to keep time just for us. A big part of this blog in the beginning was about the fight not to lose ourselves entirely to the children and family life. We lost that battle. Obviously. All of the sudden I am wearing dad clothes and walking around Target in slippers and excited about some new yogurt flavor I just saw.

Anyway.

That quick little impromptu date came at the end of a week of pregnancy tests, Cole was about 7 days late, and every day, she took a new test, and every day it was negative, and we would wait 3 minutes, then look at the stick, then explode: "WHAT?!! This is fucking crazy." and after 6 days it was just full on bonkers and confusion. Turns out she was just thrown off schedule as her cycle was lining up with new people at work. That is one of the strangest things about women I think-- some sister planet comes into your orbit and all of the sudden galaxies collide and start pulling against the other, and everything has to align just right just so that everyone is spraying hormones at the same time. Just crazy.

As soon as we knew that Cole was not pregnant. I felt relieved. I wasn't expecting that reaction. Not at all. I was relieved? I was. I'm not ready. I had no idea I wasn't ready. I want my wife. That's exactly what I want. So we talked, and we decided to take full advantage of all of our wonderful grandmas and grandpas, and good friends,while they all still think the children are adorable and lovely and want to watch them. So we will happily accept the offers, and concentrate solely on us for a few hours a week. Just a few hours, that doesn't sound like much, but I mean just that one hour alone last week was like getting an adrenaline shot plunged into my heart. We went home and made out like teenagers, (although I had just shaved my beard off a couple days prior, so that make-out session wasn't so great for Cole. The stubbles. Ouch.) The point is, that even if it is just one outing a week, with an occasional weekend getaway thrown in, it's going to give us the chance to just be Ryan and Cole and its really easy to forget who they are sometimes. I see Cole smile every single day, but there is something completely different when she is smiling back at me just because we are sitting across from one another and we know we can talk about anything we want without a child climbing on your head. Even when we were out with friends, there is just something amazing about looking across a crowded room and catching her eyes and getting that smile of hers. It's always going to make me swoon.

The strangest part of marriage I have found is that you can spend every single day together, hours on end, and talk constantly about all kinds of things, but somehow have no idea that you feel lonely.

A few P.S. things:

If you do head over to the new Tumblr there is an "Ask" feature located in the header. I have never really opened up to questions before. But it would be kind of interesting to see if anyone has anything on their minds.

If you have not heard I am really addicted to instagram, and am loving the photos, and my buddy Mike just sent me this cool new thing: Watch out refrigerator, here comes instagram magnets.

Poof

2011-10-11T11:40:00.000-04:00

I usually save these Instagram shots for the Tumblr site I started. However today when I sent this pic through Instagram and filled in the caption: "School Kid" it made me run out of air, and I got sad. I went with Cole this morning to drop the kids off at school so we could spend some time together this morning. I can't seem to catch up with Cole, I still miss her as much as when I was out of town. She is doing so great being back at the salon, I love seeing her there.

So this picture. Ugh this picture. Looking at this picture of Tessa and standing there in the courtyard of her school, it finally occurred to me why I have been feeling so off. Why I have been so quiet around here, and online in general. I don't have nearly the amount of time that I used to have with everyone, and being online is time I can be with my family, and in a blink, my baby girl is in school. And she looks like a kid. And I don't want to miss the time we get together because of being online. Tessa ran around the school calling out "Daddy look" and she was so excited to show me all the things she likes there. I have been avoiding going, because I didn't want to believe she was already ready for school. It was so easy for her. She just loves it. She jumped in. I got so busy with work and travel, Cole and I had to find a consistent smart option for Tessa to thrive when I am gone. It was a weird blow, to see how much she loved being at school. I kind of secretly wanted her to think staying at home with dad was WAY more fun than school. I lost out to construction paper and glue sticks, and a pack of 2 year olds that think she is hilarious, and scream and run faster and louder than I do.

So I am making some blogging changes around here. I am going to try some things out. I want to see what it feels like to get rid of twitter, and to just photo blog for awhile. Tell my stories without all the jib jab I am prone to jab. I am really loving the Instagram Tumblr relationship, so I think I want to focus on shooting on film exclusively here, and use this blog to share that progress. I need to be quiet. I am busy in my own head. Normally that leads to some great inspired energy to put into this space, it is just going somewhere else right now...

I have a project I have been concentrating on that has derailed pretty much everything I had been focusing on prior-- the hair blog for Cole, shooting more fashion work, launching a real deal photo/video business. All of it has been put on hold for the last few months as I am working on a slightly insane project for my family. It could become a cool opportunity, but whether it does or not, it is something that I think will really change our lives for the better no matter what happens. The odds are so slim and small I would never dare count on it. I only mention it, because I have been putting so much energy into it, that I wanted to address it in some way. Vague enough?! I know. I know. Why even mention it, I am so irritating.

So, as I am going to be working with film, the posts might be a little slower, but I am definitely NOT going anywhere.

I am excited to be quiet. With all that is going down in the world, and seeing the news unfold each day, my head is so busy with worry and opinions, and I see the writing on the wall for some hard times in my industry, even harder than before. It's getting harder for everyone. I'm not ready to march the family into protests or anything, but I am absolutely storing acorns for this winter rolling in fast. It's going to be a harsh one. I worry, that's just what I do. I worry.

Let's Get Caught Up

2011-10-10T09:04:00.003-04:00

I hadn't planned on such a long silence around here, I was lucky enough to get a string of work all right in a row, and it left me a little short on the spare time. So I figured I would fill up a post with a sampling of what has kept me away. It was interesting to me to see this work rolled out in a nice neat column to see how truly random the work flow has been this year.

I shot a project for the very talented stylist Kimmi Jones who works with Cole at the salon Alchemy here in town. We set up shop at the salon on an off day, and did a variety of looks. We actually got some of these shots printed and mounted with some before/after Polaroids I took mounted alongside the finished pieces, so the displays are essentially makeovers. I really like the way they turned out. For any of you buddies that go to Alchemy, they are hanging up in the reception area, and be sure to tell Kimmi congratulations :)

I shot 3,904 images over the course of 3 days for Redken who was in town doing a hair show for Florida salons. It's always interesting to be surrounded by 1,800 hairstylists and salon owners.

Redken threw in a fashion show just for fun one of the nights...

And then I set up shop and shot out some party booth pics. I always make sure I have had a little bit to drink so I loosen up enough to get people to loosen up enough. I mean it's a party, it should look like it was at least a fun time.

And then I jumped on a plane and headed off to Hadley, MA. I absolutely fell in love with this place, and actually had to force myself to stay focused during the shoot, because I kept drifting off in my head fantasizing about coming home, and convincing everyone to move here. It was completely an unexpected reaction, and I am already making plans to bring Cole back for a weekend just so she can see it for herself. Of course it helped that I had such incredible hosts. This ended up being one of my most favorite jobs I have done.

I went to Hadley to make a book trailer for Storey Publishing, (I know a book trailer again, who knew I would get so excited about making book trailers!). Storey is a branch of Artisan books, and they make books about country wisdom, do-it-yourself, gardening, and well-being. And in this case they are releasing a book on a couple of friends who started sewing together and made a book about Improv Sewing. Here are some screen shots from the soon to be released trailer. It was such an easy location to shoot at. I am really excited to get to the final edit of this piece and share it here.

The downside to being busy of course is that I miss my family so much, so there is always the plugging myself back into their lives day. The kids are super hyper at first, and then act a little bitter and weird for a couple hours, like "HEY! You left us. How could you do that?!" Not to mention that my traveling is a big disruption to The Littlest Buddies crucial routine, I fear there is going to be a day as he gets older and more rigid and dependent on his routines, that I am not going to be able to travel for work. Time will tell. The kids were extra amped up this weekend because everyone has been patiently waiting to dig into the Halloween decorations and get the house looking like Halloween town. So we spent the rainy weekend inside making our big Halloween plans. We think the children have decided on robots, despite LB marching around the house proclaiming that he is "Pumpkin Man." As far as the robot thing goes, I will say that two year olds are the perfect height for a good ol fashioned Astro droid, but I don't think we will go that route. This is definitely Cole territory. I will start looking for the perfect boxes.

This week is anniversary week around here. Pacing the Panic Room turns three years old. I have no real plans on how to celebrate that milestone. I just know that I am pretty blown away looking back at how much things have changed in just three years. I am of course the most happy to see the biggest changes in the photography around here, I can't believe how bad some of the stuff I was shooting was. How much I relied on Photoshop to "save" pictures. Ugh. Just terrible behavior. I will most definitely be getting sappy and grateful about all of the encouragement and support that I have received the last three years from the people who read here. Some of which have been reading from the beginning. I can't say thank you enough for the comments and emails that have been sent that have served as sweet kicks in the ass to keep working hard and growing, and motivating me to keep chasing down dreams. It's absolutely a crazy time in America to be trying to figure out how to have a dream life, I am lucky to get the work that I do, and I really truly feel like without the chance to come here and vent, and try things out, and experiment, and be a panicky mess, that i wouldn't have the confidence to keep running after the jobs that I do every day. So thank you.

P.S. While I was mostly absent from this blog for a couple weeks, I managed to stay active on Instagram and blogged those shots on my Tumblr, which I am really enjoying. I love that it has gotten me to shoot the everyday in a much more casual snapshots and glimpses kind of way. I feel like it tells better stories than I do. So I am most definitely fully addicted to the combo of Instagram and Tumblr. If you have not checked it out, it lives HERE

Tessa's Cookie Party

2011-09-27T09:07:00.000-04:00

**So over the last year after I started and then without explanation stopped the whole Two and a Half Minutes with Tessa video series, I received quite a few emails and comments asking why? Why did I stop doing it? Well... the short answer is, that it felt too personal. With all the sharing that goes on around here, pointing that camera on her while she ate for those couple minutes just didn't feel right. It felt a little too Truman Show, ya know?! So I stopped doing it.

With that said, it's been awhile since I just let the camera roll on Tessa being Tessa and shared it around here. And today there is a couple 2 minutes of video of Tessa being her adorable 2 year old self, pouring over with imaginative play, and creating her own story line. I can't remember the last time I smiled so big, I think it must have been when LB sang us "What A Wonderful World."

Last week Cole and I ended up with a few days off together, and we decided we should finish the kids playroom. We got rid of a bunch of the noisy Christmas toys, and tried to think of play areas that would keep them entrenched in fantasy and imagination, and creating. So this is what we came up with, their finished room. Ta-dah!

At the end of the day, after dinner, after bath, and jammies were on, Tessa really broke this new playroom in properly, and put on quite a show. She threw a good old fashioned cookie party for her toys. Cole noticed her running into the room, and setting up her favorite dolls at the table, and then start setting out pots and pans in front of them, and then Cole yelled for me to get the camera. We sat and watched her play in this room for a good 30 minutes straight. It was amazing to see her go. What a payoff right? We had just finished the room, looked at one another, and thought, are the kids even going to play in here? And then Tessa answered with this performance.

I know this video is probably just way insanely cute to Cole and I, but I wanted to share anyway for the buddies that have been watching Tessa grow up from afar. This one is for you guys.

Taking Better Pictures of Your Kiddos

2011-09-26T09:33:00.003-04:00

**UPATE- AND THE WINNER IS.... Elise who has a blog called Funky and Delightful and apparently triplets!!! Well there you go. Congrats to you Elise. Send me an email (there is a link to it in the about me section), and I will get you a copy of the book. Thanks for entering and checking out the book today everyone. If you still want to grab a copy, do so right HERE

**UPDATE - Rachel has given me permission to give away one e-book to someone today, so anyone here that is interested after reading this post, just leave a comment saying so and you are entered. I will use that random number generator thingy and pick someone at 9PM EST tonight. Good luck to everyone.

It's pictures like this magic below that make me just melt over Rachel Devine's photography. It's not just the nitty gritty technical side that she clearly knows and wields so well, it is her ability to take that photography know-how of light and shadows and she turns her camera into another eye. She plucks these moments out of the air so effortlessly, and her photos are filled with emotion and life. It's one thing to see your kids out in the world and experiencing new exciting sights and think to yourself... "geez this is such a great big moment for them." and it's a whole other thing to put your camera in front of that moment, click the shutter and have that story told in one perfect photo. Her children are going to have a connection to this place, and this time their whole lives because of this photo. I love that.

photo via: Rachel Devine at her blog Sesame Ellis

That is my favorite kind of photo to take. The picture that bonds to the subject, the picture that people hold onto and cherish their whole lives because it is so full of emotion and memory. That is absolutely the number one thing that excites me about kid photography. I don't think about the photo for the parents, I think about the photo for the child when they are all grown up and soaking in these glimpses of who they were, a little moment along the way to adulthood.

So I am really excited to tell you that Rachel has put out a new best friend for any of you with a stubborn shutter finger, a companion, a little buddy that whispers sweetly in your ear and tells you how to get the images to come out of the camera the way you see things with your own eyes. Rachel has put out a brand new E-book called CLICK, and it's designed for people that are struggling with capturing better photos of their kids. She has filled this thing with tons of great examples, and has laid out the lessons in really practical common sense language. I am absolutely telling you that if you are always bummed when you shoot your kids being adorable, if your photos just never look the way you want them to, then this is the great big boost that you were looking for. If you are still trying to stand your kids in a line in their best clothes and saying "Cheeeeeeese!" and surprised your pictures feel stuffy, then this is something you need to read.

Here is a quick look at what's inside of CLICK!

CLICK

THINK: Forget the “spray-and-pray” approach to kid photography, and learn to spot better opportunities to capture young ones experiencing everyday life.

PREPARE: With the right equipment on hand, and an understanding of essential photography concepts—from shot setup, to styling and safety—you’ll be ready to have some serious fun taking fabulous kids photos.

SMILE: Consciously develop your intuitive skills to ensure making photos is fun for kids of all ages and personality types—and for the photographer, too!

REFINE: Learn the photo processing tricks and techniques that’ll ensure every photo in your album, and on your wall, is truly unforgettable.

RESEARCH: Experiment with different styles and equipment, so you so you never miss a chance to capture a special moment, at any time, in any setting.

PUSH: Expand your creative boundaries with a series of practical challenges, each of which shows you new ways to make more evocative shots.

LOOK: Get inside the heads of five extremely innovative kids photographers, and benefit from their personal tips and advice.

I was really honored to be invited by Rachel to contribute some words and images to CLICK, and am still scratching my head in disbelief seeing it all finished. She has made a great resource that I feel lucky to have as part of my arsenal for taking better photos.

While I am still on my own journey in photography trying desperately to see where I want to place my energy and passion this has certainly nudged me in a direction that I seem to keep finding myself.

If you want to hear more about this E-book, read testimonials, see some more samples, then you can CLICK here.

Enjoy this book if you get it, I will be using it all week and turning my camera on the kiddos.

And a HUGE thank you to Rachel for putting this out.

**UPDATE - Rachel has given me permission to give away one e-book to someone today, so anyone here that is interested after reading this post, just leave a comment saying so and you are entered. I will use that random number generator thingy and pick someone at 9PM EST tonight. Good luck to everyone.

My Fashion Week

2011-09-19T00:00:00.004-04:00

This was my first stab at capturing some of Fashion Week, and since the moment I got on the plane to fly home, I wanted another stab at it. It felt like right when I shook all the nerves, and felt my hands and feet for the first time, it was over. Just like that. Over. I am already making plans for next season. I can't wait.

Diesel

*************

Reed Krakoff
**I had to catch my cab to the airport home and missed the show, so I lost the chance to shoot this collection, you can watch it HERE.

*************

Ports 1961

P.S. In case you didn't get enough Fashion Week, and you want to see a really stunning batch of photos from another perspective, I invited the insanely talented Jason Hudson to join me and focus on shooting stills while I blasted away at video, and he delivered a group of really beautiful images. He even managed to sneak a couple shots of me working. Sneaky Sneak :) It was also the first time the two of us had ever met, and he described that meeting just perfectly so I will let you read all about it from him. I will just say it was the closest I have ever come to screaming OH MY GOD YOU'RE MY BEST FRIEND NOW, ever. Ever. Thanks for looking. This was a huge mess of fun and a great experience to be around all of this. His post is HERE.

The Last Days of Summer

2011-09-16T09:30:00.000-04:00

We made the most of our summer that's for sure, we lived in swimsuits most days, and smelled like sunblock and chlorine, and ate watermelon, and fresh berries, and something off the grill almost every dinner. I have been scanning in Polaroids that I didn't post and figured I would put up a collection to officially say goodbye to this summer. It was easily the most fun I have had in this Florida heat in years, probably since I was a kid. I'm actually bummed it's over and I can't remember the last time I could say that about a summer. Bring on the Fall, we are ready for you.

It's Here: Design Sponge at Home

2011-09-15T09:33:00.000-04:00

Just by chance while I was in NYC shooting this week, I noticed that Grace Bonney from Design Sponge was having her official book launch party on one of the nights I had free for her new book Design Sponge at Home. I made it a point to drag my sorry tired butt to the party, and support and celebrate the book. I was so excited that I got to go and see the finished book, and hold it in my hands. It's real, it's beautiful, and it's so great to witness Grace and Amy welcoming this book.

**If you are not familiar with Design Sponge, take a look HERE, and prepare to become addicted. AND if you are new reading around this blog, a few months back I got the chance to work with Grace and Amy from Design Sponge and I made the book trailer for them. Which I have conveniently embedded right here for you to play.

If I did my job right, that should have made you want to buy this book immediately. If that's the case, go ahead an click HERE and make that happen. Unless of course Grace is coming to your hometown and throwing a book event, then you should just wait, go to the party, meet Grace, and get her to sign you a copy :) Her tour schedule and book event info is HERE.

I was in great company that night for the party-- I had been shooting a show that day with Jason Hudson from one of my favorite blogs These Roving Eyes, and so of course he came with me. Jason was excited to go and meet a blogger he loves named Amy Merrick, and we met up with my long time IRL and blogging buddy Chloe. So it was a big mess of internet comes alive and loads of fun.

The pictures above come from the always impressive and adorable Smilebooth folks. Grace had them on hand, and it was obviously a hit, if it even managed to lure me into posing for pictures. The vodka helped.

It was a great party, I am so excited for their tour, and please, if you are lucky enough to be in one of the cities they are hitting, make it a point to go. You won't be disappointed.

Huge congrats to Grace, and to Amy, and to everyone at Design Sponge.

My First Time Shooting at Fashion Week

2011-09-13T00:35:00.002-04:00

I wasn't eaten alive.

Tonight I attended my first ever NYC Fashion Week event and got the assignment to shoot behind the scenes in the model room at the Marc by Marc Jacobs Spring 2012 show, and it was quite a first show to be thrust into. I am covering a few shows this week for Redken, and although I am almost exclusively rolling video on most of this, I was able to sneak in some still shots for everyone here (because you're the best!) I wish I had thought to shoot more, I was all hell bent in video mode, so it was a pain to break out of it. I'm makin a movie!

But I did want to give you all a little glimpse of the backstage magic before the show. The show that I didn't really get to see. Well I saw it. On monitors backstage, and I saw it all come together over the course of 4 hours before the walk. I just didn't make it out front to the photo pit to get the glides down the runway.

I think the best thing I had going for me walking into this new experience, was that I had no idea what I was doing. Meaning, I didn't know the rules, where I should be, where I could and couldn't go, I wasn't shooting for print, so I wasn't bound by a certain look. I was just sort of cut loose, and told to cover things the way i cover them. So I didn't let myself get intimidated when a mob of photogs would storm through and fire away at someone. I couldn't believe some of the contraptions these guys run around with, some of it was impressive, and some of it was questionable. They all had their own way of getting what they wanted to get, and it was scary at first standing there all brand new with my Canon mounted with a 24mm. I got used to it. I kept thinking... "You have a really great beard. People like beards." and then I was okay.

So here is a glimpse backstage at the Marc by Marc Jacobs Spring 2012 Collection.

This shot of the runway settup was at the rehearsal, during the actual show there wasn't a single square of free space. not a square to spare

**The hair look was created by the splendid Guido Palau who really inspired me to work harder at doing what I do after I heard him speak a year ago. And now I am here in NYC following him around to shows at Fashion Week, shooting work he is doing. That shit blows my mind.

Below is the only single still frame I took in the wardrobe room back stage, right when the models lined up to walk out for the show. One little tiny taste of the new Marc by Marc Jacobs Spring 2012 collection.

Bummed I didn't get shots of the swimsuits he debuted. You will love them. Fabulous one pieces. No bikinis. Loads of bold colors in everything. I am sure you will find tons of photos of the actual show online all over the web today. And most of the headlines will be how freakin scorching hot it was in the Armory, because it was. Oh yes... they live streamed the show last night as well, so if you are really curious, go find it. So right when I took this shot, I decided I would take my chances and go out to the front of house in the madness and shoot some of the show. Ha! Not a chance. There was no room. No sight line. And no way. So crowded. Of course it was. I should have just stayed where I was. Rookie.

Tomorrow I am shooting the Diesel show and meeting the super cool and talented photo hero of mine Mr. Jason Hudson, who will be coming along with me to the shoot to take some pictures of his own. AND then we are going to see Grace Bonney and welcome her big beautiful Design Sponge at Home book into this world with her at a launch party here in the city. Then I am sure there will be some drinking, and eating, and laughs. This will be my first NYC trip without any Papya hotdogs :( I am trying to keep Fit. We talked about that last week.

Take care everyone, and thanks for always cheering for me and my family. This is an exciting week.

Brand New Things

2011-09-12T07:15:00.001-04:00

There is something so cool being around brand new parents, it's like a weird kind of scared shitless. Meaning, it's a concoction of fear completely unique from all other kinds of afraid. It's fear fueled entirely by intense love, and you just don't want anything to harm or hurt this brand new little tiny thing. You lay that baby down into your world, and you start to question the furniture, and the temperature of the air, and the family dogs, and dirty hands are the enemy, and within minutes that new Mama and Dad know, "she doesn't like to be held like that, you have to do it like this," and they take that crying baby out of the hands of friends and grannies, and the baby calms in an instant. It's all magic. It's so great.

So I was really happy to take photos of this brand new family the other day, and be around all that energy and sparks of love flying around the room. They are such a great couple, and now they have a baby girl in their lives to share their heart with. So excited for them all. And even more excited for Cole and I that all of our dreams of our friends having babies are starting to come true!! haha we're so selfish.

Pictured above are friends Haley & Brice, and their little baby girl Dovey, and I actually had the honor of being at her birth. It was an emotional one, they had her at home in water last week, and that house was just busting with love and trust. For some reason, I spent half my time present in their moment, the other half I was in my own head, revisiting the birth of Tessa, and kept thinking of Cole and I having another baby-- and when is it the right time, and is it fair to LB, and to her career, and to mine, and then I would snap out of it when Haley would have a contraction, and everyone in the room would focus on her.

The coolest moment at each home birth I have witnessed, is that little gift the body and baby gives the mom, when right before the baby comes out, there is this break in the contractions. Like it was all super intense, contraction after contraction, big pushes, and then all the sudden, there is this eerie calm, so quiet and still, enough of a break that the mama will actually fall asleep for a few minutes, and everything goes still but your own breath, just waiting and listening, everyone else in the room relaxes a little, and then the calm lasts so long that it starts to build and feel really exciting, and then BAM that next contraction hits, The mom wakes up, and before you know it, there is a baby in her arms, and the air changes.

It's incredible, that little gift of energy. The body wants you to succeed.

****

Speaking of scared shitless and brand new things... I'm on a plane to NYC right now to attend my very first Fashion Week ever. And just like that, I am going to be back stage at Marc Jacobs tonight, trying not to get in the way, trying to feel like I belong there somehow, and then taping out my spot in the photo pit out front, so I can capture the walk, the march down the runway, and I am going to be there. It feels crazy. I wish that I knew how to appreciate these kinds of things fully. I spend almost the entire time being afraid of them, and then they are over, and it just becomes something that I did once. These next few days are going to fly by. I will try and update from backstage if I can. Instagram. I'm hooked :)

Have a great week everyone!

P.S. If you want some eye candy, take a look at some really incredible family session work. Here is photographer Tim Coulson, he does great things. Treat yourself.

And Then They Went Shopping

2011-09-08T07:30:00.000-04:00

It seems like everywhere I look on the internet people are pouring over with joy about Zara finally having an online store... finally. So I guess you can consider this my Zara post.

Cole took Tessa to the mall to spend her birthday money that she had amassed, and she let Tessa pick out her own clothes. Tessa isn't shy about saying what she wants when it comes to clothes. She actually will place a nice long pondering, "ummmm" in front of her declarations of, "this one!" So she ran around the kids section of Zara and picked out a couple outfits, complete with a new pair of boots, and a little rain jacket, until she had used up her birthday funds. They both came home excited about their shopping trip, and I realized that this was one of the first times that they went shopping together, just the two of them. They sat there on the living room floor, surrounded by bags and had a blast showing everything off, while I would "ooh and aah" and say "WOW" when Tessa was really excited. Tessa has always loved shoes, and so she was pulling at her boots and stuffing her feet into them before they were out of the box.

So of course I had to shuffle everyone out in the backyard for a little photo shoot. Tessa still isn't interested in standing still to have her picture taken, so we always have to give her something to do rather than fight her busy feet. So filling up a water can and letting her pour out the water was enough to keep her planted in one place long enough for a focus.

We've been teaching Tessa how to peel apart the instant film, and she seems pretty impressed to find a picture under there each time. Now we just have to get her to hold it by the little white border :)

**All photos taken on the Polaroid 600SE mounted with the 127mm lens using the Fuji FP-3000B instant film.

The Greatest Fortune Cookie She Ever Received

2011-09-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

She cracked open an old fortune cookie that had been lying around from my terrible orange chicken I ordered a week ago, and got a little kiss on the mouth from the Universe. There were a few to choose from, as I always forget to open them. This one was waiting around for Cole to get a sweet tooth and curious about her fortunes. Cole has been doing so much work to make sure The Littlest Buddy can be at this new school he is at, which has totally made all of our lives better, and as much as I can say thank you and be appreciative about it, this little message was just so perfectly put that it made her shoulders relax and take a breath, and acknowledge that she is indeed that little boys light. She does so much for all of us.

So to whoever slaved over this fortune and decided to slip this one into a cookie that found its way to Cole. Thank you. Keep up the great work cookie writers.

Have you been surprised by any cookies lately? Have any perfect fortunes told that just floored you?

Life Makes Me Quiet

2011-09-06T08:30:00.000-04:00

The other day as we were getting out of the car, and walking to the front door of our house, Tessa looks up and spots the moon in the sky. It wasn't a glorious moon, just a little sliver that day. It was dusk, so it wasn't even shining a full glow. Just a slice of moon. Stuck up in the sky. She saw it right when she stepped out of the car, and she yelled while pointing up, "The sun!" and I said, "No honey, that's the moon." And she looked back at me, smiled and corrected herself, and began saying "moon." Then she sat down, right there in the grass, crossed her little legs, leaned back on her arms so she was aimed up, and she sat there and just looked at it. The moon. For no reason at all. Just because it was the moon.

So I sat down next to her, and we talked about the moon and how the Sun has been chasing her for centuries, and just can't seem to catch up. It was a small conversation, as big as you can have with a two year old, a balance of simple factual tidbits, and more fantastical pondering of things like: can Buzz Light Year really fly to the moon on those wings of his, will his helmet stay closed on a trip that far? Could he see us from the moon if he was standing on it? And then I shut my mouth and just sat next to her-- so she would soak up the crucial life lesson that you don't have to talk the whole time you marvel at something incredible and divine. Sometimes things are just so perfectly neato that you don't have to turn to anyone and ask, "isn't this incredible?!"

She sat there way longer than i could have ever guessed. But when she was done, she was done. Like she had sipped all she was going to get from this drink, and discarded it.

It's funny to me, that I could wake up on Sunday morning, get dressed with the family in appropriate attire and attend a funeral, then suddenly that Sunday night find myself standing in a friends living room filming their baby daughter being born into this world, and yet somehow I can't find a way to describe in words the personal experience of witnessing that kind of contrast. Seeing the messy face of grief at the end of life, and then the gut wrenching joy of new life in the same day, it's just too much. And on the drive home from that birth, after all I had experienced that day, what I thought about the most was how beautiful it was to watch my daughter sitting in the summer grass and stare up at the moon and smile, knowing that these brand new parents I had just left will get to experience life in ways they can never guess. The things that will make them smile and ache are living in everything, and it's exciting to see the world all over again.

That's the gift. That's what we get. We get to be excited about the moon again.

Pals

2011-09-02T09:15:00.003-04:00

The girls of the band Rural Juror

While on the road with Rabbit, on theNashville, TN stop we all met this newly formed girl group named Rural Juror (yep after the 30 Rock episode). The girls had all gone to the super cool Southern Girls Rock N Roll Camp and formed the group from there. They performed 3 songs before Rabbit played, and the thing I noted most from watching them, was during their setup, and sound check, this group of girls were all so encouraging and supportive of one another. When Rabbit suggested they plug into their PA and bigger sound system rather then the girls smaller practice amps, there were nerves and a little worry, "no way, I don't want people to hear how bad I am." one of the girls said, (she had just been given bass duties and was still in the process of learning parts) the rest of the band all jumped on her, "don't say that, you can totally do this!" and just hit her with a swarm of positive reinforcement. It was a real, we are all in this together attitude. They picked one another up. Complimented one another. It was really great to witness this kind of camaraderie.

Two of the girls are sisters, and they ended the show with a really great cover of the song "Valerie" that Amy Winehouse had famously covered. Seeing the two sisters sing together and play was a highlight of the whole trip. It's always amazing to see siblings harmonize and play together, there is just something so beautiful about their relationship that comes out with the singing. Like you can just see the two of them growing up together, and how truly awesome it was for them to discover they could sing like this. Practicing together, and listening to the other, until their voices blend into this one pretty voice.
Awesome.

I snapped this photo of the girls outside the show. I took one for them. And one for me to remember them. They look like a band that could go places. Dreams and potential and confidence. I hope Tessa notices this picture someday in the stack of photos laying around, and asks, "who are they?" and I hope there are still places around like the Southern Girls Rock N Roll Camp for her to go.

Fit

2011-09-01T07:45:00.002-04:00

Growing up I was a swimmer. I started at a very early age, and by the time I was 8 or 9 years old I was participating in two a day practices and running on the side. I'm not going to get into the enormous amount of pressure put on me to win. I will say I went to see the Doctor for the first time at age 8 for what I insisted was a heart attack. Turns out I was so full of panic and anxiety that my chest ached. Funny thing panic, it can convince you of all kinds of things.

A restrictive diet was part of the package with all this exercise and training, so as a kid, I didn't get access to a ton of junk food. It was a mystery to me, so I craved it. Cried for it. I just wanted to junk out on the same stuff the other kids were eating. My mother would try her best to satisfy these bad urges with healthy alternatives, like carob coated raisins instead of chocolate bars, knox blocks made with real fruit juice instead of jello, water flavored with fructose instead of gatorade (back in the day they thought Fructose was a good substitute for table sugar). Looking back, my mom was WAY ahead of her time on the nutrition front, and continues to this day to make great tasting healthy home cooked masterpieces.

I remember when I was a little kid, riding my little banana seat bicycle down this busy road I wasn't supposed to ride on, and stashing it behind the corner store. Going inside, and helping myself to the candy aisle. They used to keep all their single piece candy, like Charms Blowpops, and Now & Laters, and things like that on the very bottom shelf-- so you had to pop a squat to get to it, this made it easy to shove things into my socks, and my pants. I would buy one piece of candy, and then sit on my bike and eat all of the rest of it before I got back home.

I moved out of the house when I was 18. I will always remember my very first solo grocery trip. I spent close to $300 on Hawaiian Punch and bags and bags of Doritos. I was so excited to get home and make my first box of Mac N Cheese. Why does this powdered cheese taste SO good. I ate pounds of this. I bought every flavor of Cap N Crunch they made, two of the Peanut Butter flavor. It was absurd.

So heres the deal. I have always associated bad food with something I was denied, and missed out on, that craving stuck with me. I'm that kind of asshole that thinks they deserve to eat bad food. The terrible food became a personal reward system. I am part of that culture where every time I have a rough day, or I am tired and not in the mood to cook, I feel like I deserve a break, and so I buy a bag of garbage from whatever fast food place is closest. As a kid, when I would win a race, or have a good meet, I would be allowed to have something bad for me as a "special treat" so now that I am in charge of my own life, I seem to conveniently find reasons to reward myself with "special treats."

I ate total crap for a great big hunk of my life, and what I did was create eating habits that have stuck with me my entire life. Habits I am struggling to break in my adult life.

In the house I grew up in, I remember my father, almost every night, sneaking into the kitchen while the rest of us watched TV and he would get some snack treat down from some stash of his on a high shelf, we would hear the crinkle of plastic wrappers, and the crunch of chips, or cookies, and we would all turn around and he would be standing there grinning and eating away. My mother would fuss at him in this funny way, and we would all laugh. She would say his name in this great little high pitched voice, and we would just bust up.

Lately I keep catching myself standing in the kitchen away from Cole and the kids, and pigging out. Cole will spot me in there, and say something simple like, "Yeah that makes sense, eat some more of those chips." and I laugh, and in my head, I think I have recreated this funny moment. Ugh, I'm a psycho.

In my crazy brain, eating like shit is something I deserve to do. It became a part of my "fierce" independence. I have managed to educate and read and figure out how to make healthy food for everyone. I even go through phases where I can get myself on the right track and eat right. The kids both devour their greens and fruit like I can kill a bag of cheettos. So I am proud of them for that. They eat really well actually. The Littlest Buddy always wows people with the things he will eat. Take him to a Korean restaurant and he will eat anything you put in front of him. So I am cautious to keep up and maintain their good practices. So almost all of my bad eating is done in private which just makes it feel even more absurd and disgusting.

The place I am at right now is that embarrassing moment when I look in the mirror and i feel shame, and I say stupid crap to myself in disgust. Then I'm like, whoa dude, you're talking to yourself about being a fat ass. How did this happen?

I can sit here and track back the origins for my junk food lust. I have read enough books on nutrition that I know exactly what I should be eating. I know how to prepare it. I know how to buy it. My mother has passed on many great traits, I know how to grow it, I know how to cook well, I know why it's important. So why the heck can't I just make it my permanent lifestyle? I am so sick of derailing healthy efforts every single time I get busy, or stressed. I hate knowing where the crazy comes from, when it was born, how it grew, how it was nurtured, but somehow I can't just let it go. Landing a cool job or getting a piece of good news, shouldn't be a green light to shove a bag of chicken wings down my throat.

I'm struggling. I am at this very embarrassing point where I realized I actually have a food thing. I somehow managed to punish myself with food.

As stupid as I feel typing this into a blog that people read, it doesn't feel nearly as bad as it does to not have control over this.

I was reminded recently of something that I say, "Keep pushing for the life that you want." I have always said it in regards to career, and not until this morning have I ever applied that pressure to owning my lifestyle. Sometimes you have to turn all the lights on in your head so you can see again. Hit those switches and take a good long look, figure it out with some clarity.

Here's to fighting fights. Whatever it is that you're trying hard to change, dig deep today, and don't let today be a set back day. Just let it be one more day that you get through doing the right thing, making better choices. See how that feels.

Sophomore

2011-08-31T08:34:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was one of those days where everything that I needed to complete a simple task was on empty. I had an invoice I had to send out, and something that should have taken a quick 5 minutes to print, stuff into an envelope, slap a stamp on, and mail away-- ended up taking me the entire morning to accomplish.

If you already follow me on TWITTER than you already heard about the "smearing" and I apologize.

So I tried to print this invoice, and of course the ink is out. Ugh. Errand. Load Tessa in the car, start it up. Ugh. Gas light is on. Another errand. So I head to the gas station. Pull in. Grab a pump. Ewww, I immediately feel something gooey and smushy and wet, and "OH MY GOD IT'S SHIT!" The entire inside of the gas handle had been smeared with dog shit by someone, which is now all over my hands. "FOOOOOCCCCKKKKK" I look around to see who saw the outburst and if there are any giggling prankster hooligans hiding nearby watching their handy work. Nothing.

The worst of this, is that you still need the gas. So you have to just stand there and keep pumping. When life hands you dog crap on a gas pump, you keep pumping.

The woman in the mini van behind me, has the shocked look on her face, I notice she is also standing there with a hand full of dog shit shaking in disgust. Luckily I have baby wipes and hand sanitizer and share the wealth. We chat about humanity being on the brink. We both just keep saying, "who does this?" I get in the car and had to laugh about how simple and cruel this prank was.

I drive back home, and wash my hands 20 thousand times, with vinegar, with a lemon, with some bleach water, and they still smell bad. Ahh, toothpaste. That always works. Remember that little trick folks. It gets the smell out.

So long story short, I get the ink. It's the wrong pack, I'm out of envelopes, I'm out of stamps, I am feeling like a schmuck for being so unorganized. How can we spend so much money at Target and still be out of these kinds of things?!

Whenever a series of annoyances comes barreling at me like this, I always end up in a funny mood. Like laughing out loud in the car at myself and calm. I just think, "these are your problems?!" and I remember to feel lucky. I will take dog shit hand, and trouble remembering to keep ink in the damn printer any day. None of it is a big deal. Not even a little bit.

And then all of the sudden just to make sure my day was brighter. I get the most excellent email in my inbox from THIS super talented lady.

It's the brand new cover art for "Do Fun Stuff Vol. 2" which will be coming out close to Christmas this year. That's right, It's finally coming together. Take a good look at it. It's freakin exciting. I'm excited.

I am thrilled to share this with you. I wanted to get a new artist for each new Volume of "Do Fun Stuff" and for this effort I asked mega talent Jen Lobo who paints stunning creations using animals as her main subjects. There is so much personality and spirit in her subjects that they just push the imagination. They always feel like grand scenes from a bigger story don't they? I recently bought my favorite piece of hers for Tessa's bedroom. I hope she will make up a thousand stories in her head about that whale. I can't wait for THIS image to be in her shop.

So HUGE thanks to Jen for kicking things off for Volume Two and coming up with this scene for the cover.

In the mean time, while I get things finished up with Volume 2. Anyone that might be interested in picking up some prints I am having made of some of my work, please read below. I am participating in a silent auction. Prints. I almost never make prints.

I wanted to direct your attention to a great family that's out there making things happen for the Smith Magenis community. I recently got the chance to speak with Steve who runs a much more ambitious blog than mine, where he has chronicled a ton of great hiking trails and museums in his home state. Steve often takes along his son with him on his travels, and his son also just happens to have SMS. We recently talked on the phone for a couple hours about the charity work that he is doing, but mostly we traded stories about the boys. Steve's son is a little younger than The Littlest Buddy, just as adorable and charming. His name is Damian, and his father is doing big things to get some money raised for hard research. He has put together a really cool silent auction and I am in the process of getting some prints made to donate to the cause, and soon you will be able to go HERE to a "Dream for Damian" and bid on them along with a ton of other really great items. You can bid on anything you want, and all the money goes directly to the Smith Magenis Research Foundation. He has done a fabulous job whipping up interest and getting people on board. It's a father fighting to make a difference, not just for his own son, but for an entire community of people that just doesn't get much help or attention when it comes to research funding. I am grateful of his hard work, and for his perspective on raising a child with SMS. It has been a real comfort knowing there is another parent I can talk to about the heavy and the fun stuff.

So if you're interested in the auction, please take a look HERE.

Anything you think I should make prints of? Make available? Let me know.

Thanks for giving this some attention today and I hope you're excited about Volume 2. It's going to be a hard act to follow, but I am determined to deliver another big dose of family friendly music for your epic dance parties.

Making Good Use of Generosity

2011-08-26T08:20:00.002-04:00

Soon after I wrote THIS post a couple weeks ago about wanting to get serious about shooting film more often, THIS MAN, this sweet generous man Mr. Jason Hudson, (who has become a quick friend, mentor, and all around inspirational human since I discovered his blog a year or so ago) sent me the very camera that I had my eye on to start down that path. He did WHAT?! Yeah, that was my exact reaction too. I had spotted a Mamiya 645 in good condition at a local camera shop here, and was saving up to justify the buy, and before I knew it, I received this email from Jason...

"Hi buddy!
I have a Mamiya 645 ProTL.
Tried selling it on Craigslist, but no bites. It’s all yours, you can just have it! Pay for shipping. Polaroid back, 80mm, 55mm lens, light meter . . . Maybe more. Can’t remember. Literally fired that thing no more than 300 times. She’s a beauty. But I’ll never shoot film again."

So after some back and forth banter about how "I just can't." and "no way." and "this is too much." He shook me by the shoulders, slapped me around, and I said, "yes please." And I can't say thank you enough times. I tried. It never feels like enough. So here she is pictured below. Just after I fired my first roll of film. I have never owned a medium format camera before, and so the first thing I did was read the manual. READ. YOUR. MANUALS. Sorry, had to stress that. Amazing how many people never even open up their camera manual. Of course as always I had to watch a You Tube tutorial to load the film. I wanted to make sure I got it right the first try.

** You Tube tutorials have been a tremendous companion to just about everything I have ever wanted to learn about. It's always a great start, if you don't know how to do something, search for a tutorial on You Tube and see if it is out there, it probably is, and even if it might not be the ultimate tell all, it is usually a great first step to figuring shit out on your own.

And yes that is an Instagram shot below. I finally caved and got the kool-aid in my mouth, largely because of, who else, Jason. I admit, it has been fun. Ugh, that was tough to say. If you are also on Instagram you can find me on there now. HERE is my Insta info so you can see me struggle with learning how to take pictures with a phone. I need Cole to give me lessons.

So I ran out and bought a variety of 120 film to test. Kodak, Fuji, and Ilford. And like always when I want to do some kind of a camera test, I watch the windows for Cole to get home from work, and the second she walks in the door I'm like, "COLE! you have to get Tessa's hair to stop looking like the Feral Kid from Mad Max and please go outside in the backyard, I know it's hot, I'm sorry, and let me take pictures of you and the children."

So in preparation for my camera test, this ended up being the very first time Tessa held still long enough for Cole to put braids in her hair. It was a sweet moment. Captured on Instagram.

So the first roll of film I tried out was the Kodak Porta 400 which boasts-- "The PORTRA 400 Film is the world's finest grain high-speed color negative film. At true ISO 400 speed, this film delivers spectacular skin tones plus exceptional color saturation over a wide range of lighting conditions. For years, professional photographers have preferred KODAK PROFESSIONAL PORTRA Films because of their consistently smooth, natural reproduction of the full range of skin tones. In that same tradition, the PORTRA 400 Film is the ideal choice for portrait and fashion photography, as well as for nature, travel and outdoor photography, where the action is fast or the lighting can't be controlled."

Who wouldn't want to buy this film with that description?! These test shots were printed at a local shop here in town, on Matte paper, and I scanned them in with the CanoScan LiDE 700F. Which isn't the best scanner in the world, but it isn't the worst either. I am still searching for that solution now that I am going to shoot more film. Ugh, so expensive.

I was pleased with the results, I mean, we were just in the backyard, the light wasn't great. 3:30 in the afternoon. It was thankfully a little cloudy. I mostly wanted to make sure I could load this camera correctly, and make sure I could make crisp sharp images. Mission accomplished. Now I have a whole mess of film to experiment with and figure out what I can do with this camera.

And since I had the light meter out anyway, (which I have no idea why I waited so long to just suck it up and start using one, should have listened to you sooner Rachel), I wanted to see how much better my Polaroids would come out on the 600SE when i wasn't just guessing the exposure. The Goose is still my favorite camera to take family pictures with, as Cole says, "The Goose just makes everything look dreamy."

This is Cole with The Littlest Buddy, just after he woke up from his after school nap, we are still trying to figure out his new daytime routine, with Smith Magenis Syndrome he is often listless and sleepy during the afternoon, and it can be a challenge to get him awake. It produces both some of the sweetest moments with LB and some of the most challenging. This day, was one of those sweet, wake up slow snuggly moments, which thankfully is usually the case.

So this weekend is The Littlest Buddies birthday and I happen to have a ton of film to shoot :) Hopefully I can find a way to squeeze in copious amounts of camera time, and still be present this weekend, and not just camera zombie, grunting, and tinkering, and staring at the fun through a viewfinder.

Have a great weekend, and for all of you East Coast people, take this Irene seriously, she seems like she could be one serious bitch, and if she ends up heading up to NYC, you city folk please take care of yourselves.

To Be So Brave

2011-08-25T08:30:00.002-04:00

I received an email yesterday which led me to discover a web series about a man Tim LaFollette who died 2 days ago by the unforgiving hands of ALS better known as (Lou Gehrig's Disease).

I have been up for hours now, watching Tim's story unfold. There is absolutely nothing I can write here to encapsulate the emotion and awe in watching this mans life. To face death with grace, and heart, and love of life, it's a bravery that has only existed in films, and story books for me. I don't think I ever realized what real courage looks like, not courage like this. I have heard people say things before like "he died well, or he died bravely" and I had no idea what that looked like before, what that really meant. In this series you can see Tim clinging tightly to his spirit while his muscles fail him, while his lungs will not fill with air on their own, as he slowly becomes a prisoner trapped in his own body. That spirit of his, and the love that circles him, rallies so much support and motivates and moves so many people.

Tim LaFollette and his wife the love of his life Kaylan, are inspiring beautiful humans. Their story needs to be heard, and spread, and the lessons learned from their relationship and battle with a terminal illness is an important story. It's something that should not be ignored.

I hear people say all the time: "Well, I don't know WHAT I would do." in response to something tragic befalling a loved one. If you want to know what you should do, how you should respond, how to treat others in the face of death, this is what love looks like. This is a tremendous love story, please share it. Bookmark this series and watch it when you can, find some time, keep this man's voice alive and well, spreading around the web, inspiring others, and let his voice teach us all something new about this life we lead.

This is the trailer to Tim and Kaylan's story. It's the trailer for a 33 part web series that was made to help spread the word and awareness about Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which most people know as "Lou Gehrig's Disease." Tim LaFollette calls it "America's Best Kept Secret Disease." Please watch this trailer and follow the links below and watch their story. Thank you.

Please CLICK HERE to visit the Often Awesome website to view the entire web series. Just scroll to the bottom of the page to start with episode one. The Diagnosis.

THIS LINK is to the blogger that wrote me yesterday, Tim was her friend, and she wrote an incredible post that I wanted to pass along to you. Here is a small quote from her post, she is indeed doing her part, inspiring others to word spread, and share. Tell his story.

"About a year ago, when Tim lost his speech, he learned how to talk with his eyeballs. A special computer tracked his gaze so he could crack wise with a wicked cool robot voice.

Now he has a whole host of new voices. He has the Often Awesome Army, which is, in its own way, controlled by his gaze. He has a legacy of love plain to see in his friends and his family. And he has me, here, whispering his story in your ear. Please pass it on."

No Idea

2011-08-24T08:38:00.003-04:00

So far this year I have been courted by 15 or so brides-to-be asking me to please pretty please consider shooting video of their big day, and out of all those inquiries this year, at some point of the conversation (usually after I quoted them a price), every single couple has told me "never mind." In some cases I got a courteous "no thank you" right out of the gate, other instances it wasn't until a few months down the line that I would get a reason why they didn't need me any longer, some never wrote back at all. I don't mind so much because I don't really shoot weddings, or even have a photography business for that matter. So far I am just this guy that floats around and makes stuff occasionally. I am absolutely lost to tell you the truth. Stuck between the insatiable thirst to get better at what I do before launching some kind of official photo related business, and the urge to hurry up and get something started that I can nurture and grow into something great.

The point is, I am asked all the time to please consider shooting things that I don't normally shoot, and to quote a price, and to please think about making an exception. I usually say no. Not always. Usually. I'm a freak.

And it made me realize, I don't REALLY shoot anything. So if I were to bite the bullet and make a Photography business and build one of those sites that feature my best work (that I keep backing out of), it would read: Photographer - I DON"T really shoot family portraits, newborn sessions, senior portraits, engagement sessions, weddings, I don't REALLY shoot anything. But I might?

At the end of the day I just want a business that is my own, and have one of those cool logos, and finally have a business card, or a website. But what the heck would I put on the business card? This is part of the reason I don't have business cards. The other part is that I quite like not having them. It's worked great for me not having them.

**side conversation about why I don't subscribe to the importance of owning and carrying around business cards- I always felt like there was an advantage to NOT having cards. Here is the thing, if someone wants your info, or if you find yourself in a situation where someone is all like, "Oh nice to meet you, can I have your card?" and you're like me, and you don't have one, you can just ask for theirs instead. This way, you have total control over the contact. If they say they are out of cards, immediately ask to write down their info. Don't give them yours. You want that "ultimate power." YOU are the one reaching out to THEM, and saying "Hey remember me? We met at blah blah, and talked about doing this new super great thing together." Because, the other way around, if I were to give out a card to them, it gets messy in my head-- I am all panic mode when I don't hear from them, "What if they lost my card?!" Or maybe I start to feel insecure and think, "Oh great! I give them my card, and they checked me out, and now have no interest in my crappy work. I suck! I SUCK!" So it has always just been way better for my sanity to keep control of the contact. Bottom line is, if two people REALLY truly want to work together on something, it will happen. There has never been a business card involved in any cool thing I have ever gotten to do in my life. I have always reached out directly on my own, by phone, or email, and begged until I got to do what I wanted. It doesn't always work, but when it does.... awesome.

Back to this whole annoying reality that I don't have an actual photography business. Do I not have one because I really don't want one? Or am I afraid of failure? Or afraid of success? Why does therapy cost so much an hour? Why is it easier to spend money on a lawn service than it is on my brain?

Here is the thing, I have never put myself out there or decided that I would go one way or the other with photography. All I want to do is shoot fashion. But it's confusing because I take photos of my life and share it here, so because of that it looks like I have shot a bit of everything. I have done favors for friends, and shot some weddings, and even took some family photos once or twice. So when you cruise through archives there it all is. I guess what I am saying is, I don't have a passion to shoot these kinds of things unless I am bound to the subject emotionally. I LOVE shooting for friends and my own family because I love them. It's effortless.

I'm stuck. Confused. A little lost.

Here is the last little piece of this confusion pie I am gnawing on. I am afraid of starting a photography business because then I will get so busy trying to make that business successful by booking gigs, any gig, that I will stop shooting the things I love to shoot. Because I need money, gotta have money, because I want to be able to say I have a successful business now that I have one, duh. So all of the sudden this business becomes the reason I stop trying to do the things that I truly want to do. No room for passion projects when you have to squeeze in all your session work to pay the bills.

Reading this post back to myself, I realized a few things. I need some therapy, I just throw commas around, wherever, I want, and I have NO idea what I really want to do. I just want to keep getting better at shooting. That is the only thing I really care about. I'm not striving for perfection here, I think I am just in love with learning.

What was this post about? Two things: Do yourself a favor and stop getting business cards made. AND if you ever want to start a successful photography business don't write a blog post on your blog about how you don't really want to shoot anything.

Was this helpful? Good luck out there.

**This post actually really helped me today, and the combination of writing this out, reading it back, hearing it, and then the comments has made me realize something really important. I want to make a movie. So I am going to.

Go For It!

2011-08-23T10:20:00.002-04:00

Of course you can sing. All you have to do is believe it.
I went out for a quick 4 days with my friends from the band Rabbit! It had been years since I had been out with a band on tour, and it made me feel silly that I forgot how lonely it is to close yourself into a van 24/7 with a group of people. There is a quiet to touring that is essential. It's the good kind of silence, the kind of quiet that great couples share over coffee and newspaper reading in the mornings. There is so much calm and waiting within the constant movement to get to the next space, to set up the gear, and play the show. Tour never stops, ever, there is a clock ticking away, and each minute you take to stand in the shower a little longer, or to pull off the road for a piss, is another mile that you are off your schedule. I was totally taken off guard by the quiet, and really loved taking these photos of the band en route.

Rabbit! chose to tour differently as I spoke about in THIS POST, and the result of their decision to play the majority of their shows to an all ages audience was that they had to show up in these city stops a few hours earlier than normal. So the pressure to keep moving was even greater.

This band traveled 13,000 miles, over the course of 46 days, and played 43 shows. Wrap your head around that schedule for a minute.

What did these guys see while they were out there to make them want to keep going on a schedule like that? What was the big payoff? Have you ever seen a little kids face come to life and fill with light from the sound of music?

Do you recognize all those Bumble Bee shakers the kids are waving around like mad? The owner and creator of B. Toys fell in love with the band and donated a TON of toys for Rabbit to give out on the road. It was a great ice breaker to show up to these gigs baring gifts for the kids.

So why the aggressive tour schedule? They set out to see if they could play their shows at family friendly venues, like ice cream shops, and toy stores, and community centers, and keep a focus while they were out there on learning as much as they could about the withering arts and music programs in America. They got a first hand look at the faces of the kids and parents that are involved in their communities, and that are doing what they can on their own to bring music to their towns, and create hands on music programs for their kids. The people are finding a way is what it boils down to. This tour has spurred the band along to conceptualize and create a bigger initiative to help infuse more money into these programs that are doing what they can to keep music in kids lives. It's a big deal. You can't go around taking music away from kids. You just can't, but it's happening more and more these days at schools all over America.

The band has a brand new album out, that dropped just a few weeks ago while they were touring, It's called Go For It! and if you have never spent 9.99 before to have a soundtrack for limitless dance parties with your kids, or perfect driving music for the entire family, than you aren't spending your 9.99's very well. So go right now and get yourself their new record Go For It!. These guys played a ton of free shows and just kicked the crap out of themselves to pull this tour off, and I am so proud of them for doing these shows... so on their behalf I am "passing the plate" around here, think about buying their new album. HERE IS THE LINK

It is just about the best all around feel good fill your soul with smiles music that has ever been made. I'm not even joking. I absolutely love what this band did this summer, and am so excited that they took the time to reach out to communities around America and have decided to try and do something to get involved in the fight to save music programs for kids. It's good important work, and I can't wait to see what they do next.

How's the music and arts programs in your community? Have you seen a steady decline? Do you have great programs in your area that have emerged since kids aren't getting music in schools? We would love to hear about it. The band will be checking comments here today. Thanks, and be sure to say hi to these guys and gals.

Let's Try That First Again

2011-08-22T09:20:00.002-04:00

First Day of Pre-K

First Day of Kindergarten

First Day of First Grade

First Day of First Grade (Round 2)

I want to honor our decision not to share The Littlest Buddies life stories here in this space in any major detailed way, but also find it impossible not to give glimpses. I wasn't sure how to approach this years "first day of school" post since we have taken the intimate details of LB's life out of the spotlight, but Cole has made it simple for me to tackle this one, I can simply just focus on her for this. Today is as much her first day as it is for him. She fought for this first day. This first day is one great big heavy sigh and soft whisper to the Universe that LB please, PLEASE, have a better year at school.

Cole has been busting all week! I have never seen her more eager to send LB off to school in all the years we have been sending him on his way. Let me back up.

At the top of summer, both Cole and I were so frustrated with how emotionally beat up LB would be by the time he got home from school each day, that we knew we had to figure out a new situation for him. Let's just say things were not going well within a chaotic system. It was too much, too many, too loud, too random. And so Cole set out searching for a new scenario for him... she dug around the internet, and read, and asked around all over, and found an incredible private program for him to test into. So she spent the better part of her summer doing all the hoop jumping, and paper filling out, and records transfers, and interviews, and tests, and talks, and finger crossing, and financial wizardry, and with just a few weeks of summer left, got the boy into this school. Thankfully from all of her diligent battling and defending of his special needs at his previous IEP meetings, fighting to not only keep, but obtain new services, he had such a high Matrix score that the scholarship he was eligible for made it possible for us to send him to this school. Had she not been so on top of things, we never could have afforded this school. Now that we know of its existence we have both set out to make sure that lack of funds is never the reason he cannot attend this program. I will not feel that shame, and with the way the debt chatter keeps evolving, relying on things like scholarships is not a wise thing.

Since LB got the green light to go to this school, there hasn't been a night since that Cole hasn't read me something about this place filled to the top with complete hope and delight-- The way they deal with every little subtle nuance and moment of each day is thoughtful, and designed around a set of kids that break emotionally when expectations are not met. It's all impressive, but beyond the structure, there are glimpses of boyhood. "They have a baseball team, Ryan!" she says to me. "He gets to just be a boy sometimes at this school. Like do real actual boy things." and she says these things with such a sweet new voice and I hear them, and I know that many of these hopes are ghosts from his life before the diagnosis. Things that died when we read the list of symptoms and characteristics, and case studies, and we would search for nights on end for one case of someone with SMS that grew up, and has an independent life, and a wife, and babies. And slowly you start to cross things off the list, and here we are now, trying to find out if there is any kid with SMS that can just simply ride a two wheel bicycle. Ugh. This year is so full of hope for him. I am so sick of hope being a great big huge phony thing, this thing that you just blindly say and do. This year Cole took control of our hope, she basks in LB's calm and his smiles, and as we brace for the transition to this new schedule, here is to hope.

P.S. Of course you all noticed the red cast (LB picked it out by himself) He broke his leg this summer. He let curiosity conquer his common sense, and he stuck his foot into the front wheel of Cole's bicycle when they were on a ride together. He took his feet out of the foot pegs on the bike, and swung his foot around and poked it into the spinning spokes. That is pretty much all you have to do to break a leg. He will be out of the cast in 3 weeks. He runs around on the thing like it isn't even there. He still goes on bike rides, he is no longer curious about the spokes. Things like this will happen.

Peeling the Curtains Back - Disappointing Hotel Views

2011-08-19T08:00:00.001-04:00

After spending a little time on the road this week with my friends Rabbit! traveling across scenic highways and soaking in some sights of this gorgeous country, I realized something about the reality of road travel, and I came up with a new picture project, and so today I am here, proudly introducing a brand new photo series for you all called... "Disappointing Hotel Views in America"

Nashville, TN -- "Where Innovation Sings"

The City of Asheville, NC -- "Something for everyone"

Of course I'm joking, but there was something hysterically funny about peeling the blinds back each morning and revealing our new shitty view and saying something like, "Ahhh beautiful Nashville, the crown jewel of the south."

There was silly talk in the van of starting a Tumblr site called "Disappointing Hotel Views" dedicated to this project where people could post their shitty views and list the locations they were at. Not sure how funny it would be over time (it gets pretty slap happy in the van), but I do love the reality of what people are really seeing on the road when they stay at a hotel versus the idea of what is advertised on brochures and the expectations of post card views. I mean the views I pictured here, is what the majority of people are seeing when they stay at a hotel, but nobody wants to show this little glimpse of their vacation. What keeps coming to mind when I think of this project, is what I usually see when I stay in NYC and get the view of the alley, or a wall of bricks from the next building over, I love those the most.

I had a great time with Rabbit! and am really excited to tell you all about it more, I will be back next week posting on the regular again. It's the last weekend of summer break for us here, so we will be enjoying every little scrap of it. School starts on Monday. Yikes. Good luck everyone getting your kiddos to school on time and encouraged to conquer a new school year.

The Road to Asheville

2011-08-12T08:27:00.001-04:00

There was a point in my life when I thought I was going to be on the road the rest of my life. I was in love with the constant motion. I used to sit and imagine myself not calling anywhere home, and just finding tours, and bands, or inventing holidays to keep me moving and seeing the world. I guess that's the Sagittarius in me? Finding and falling in love with Cole really sucked the aimless wanderlust right out of me, and now I find myself sick with homesickness minutes after pulling out of our driveway, so it was a big damn deal for me to decide to pack up my camera gear and hit the road with my friends Rabbit! for a few days this summer. Granted I was planning on being gone much much longer, and finally wimped and whined my trip down to just these three dates. I really wish I could have went to that Portland show at that rock camp to witness 300 kids chanting Rabbit! How fun.

Anyone that wants to come out and see Rabbit! put on their show, I will be at the following dates listed below, so bring yourself, bring your kids, bring everyone. Be the super hip and in the know parents on the block that brings everyone to a cool show. I am doing some shooting for a little road film about their experience playing shows for kids and families, and if you live in the area I highly recommend you seeing this show. You can't help but smile the entire time... unless you are just seriously addicted to hardcore Screamo and HAVE to rage to your music, then maybe skip this one. Rabbit is steeped in sugar pop riffs and dreamy four part melodies designed to make fairies and woodland creatures blush from the sweetness. Kids adore it, but the band manages to keep it sophisticated enough for the parents to bob their heads along without feeling shame or nausea. So this is where we will be, come see all of us.

08/15/11 Nashville, TN Popo Cool Kid Stuff Time: 5:00pm Admission: FREE Age restrictions: All Ages
Address: 4017 Hillsboro Pike Suite 309A, Nashville, TN 37215. Venue phone: 615-269-6964.

08/16/11 Knoxville, TN Razzleberry’s Time: 6:30pm Admission:FREE Age restrictions: All Ages
Address: 223 Jackson Sq Oak Ridge, TN 37830. Venue phone: (865) 481-0300.

08/17/11 Asheville, NC The Hop Time: 6:00pm Admission: FREE Age restrictions: All Ages
Address: 640 Merrimon Avenue, Suite 103, Asheville NC 28804. Venue phone: 828-254-2224.

So happy to share this gig poster for the Asheville show that one of my most absolute favorite photographers on the planet Jen Altman arranged to be made for the show by a local artist there in Asheville named Katie Daisy who I highly recommend you spending some time oohing and ahhing over her illustration collections, I am absolutely going to buy a print for Tessa's bedroom re-model and want Katie's piece titled "Over the Water." So much in that one to stir Tessa's imagination. Go on GO LOOK. I will wait...

I am actually going to be doing some posts about a few artists I have found that Cole and I are saving up the bucks for to get some art on these walls around here. We are slackers and have no art, and no prints up. Such slackers. We have made it a priority. Ugh, tangent.

So Jen made a comment on Twitter about wanting to see a Rabbit! show with her girls, so I got her in touch with the band, and they put together a FREE show on her home turf at this really great ice cream shop called The Hop that hosts bands and kid acts all the time. Can't wait to get a taste of their homemade ice cream while I am there. So it is because of Jen that I am the most excited about this show, she put a lot of work into making this show happen for her community, and I just love that she got so many talented people together. I have heard similar stories of people who read here, that have orchestrated great shows for their kids and neighbors. Like this one HERE that made me so happy to hear about.

So I will be shooting my quick trip out on the road with Rabbit! and really excited to witness the joy this band has been putting on the faces of the kids and parents they play for. I have heard nothing but good things from everyone that has heard about the shows from this blog and gone out and saw them play. If any of you have ventured out and caught a Rabbit show this summer because of reading about them here, please leave a comment about your experience, I would love to hear about it.

Let me know if you're coming out, and please say hi.

Shooting in the Dark (shooting tips for the dark times)

2011-08-10T12:22:00.007-04:00

Last week I was in San Diego, it was my third invite to come and shoot the Sparklecorn party held at the Blogher conference and hosted by the fun time pop culture gossip blog Mamapop, this year I think I read that there was something like 3,200 attendees at Blogher? Maybe more. Who knows. Regardless of the number, that is a whole lot of women bloggers all in one place. The party this year was open to everyone, and the formula for success was repeated, there was a great cake made out of unicorn blood, danceable music (this year provided by DJ Skribble), and a portable polyurethane lacquered dance floor plopped down in the heart of the ballroom, and even more importantly hosts that seem to propagate fun and silliness, and with parties past, they have created a safe environment to dance with reckless abandon.

I always end up getting decent footage and still shots from the party, and I love the chance to shoot it each year, however it never fails to intimidate me every. single. time. I walk in and see the finished party set-up and realize that I don't have a shred of light to work with. I usually panic and act like a baby for a good 30 minutes, and then find vodka, until the scared look disappears from my face. This isn't a dance club with a hundred lights, and ambient glows around the fringe with hot sexy lights covered in gels and diffusion floating and spinning in the middle of the dance floor action to help create contrast and aid you in any useful way. There are no pretty pockets of light to hang around and catch cool shots at. It is a convention center ballroom, with some shitty dimmed house lights, and a tiny bit of wash from the stage. So it is basically shooting in pitch black dark. So that means turning to my Speedlight. I had a few people walk up and ask what my approach to shooting in these conditions were, and so I thought it would make a decent post. A kind of tips for shooting in the dark thing.

How many people here are afraid to use their flash? Or maybe you aren't afraid, but you hate how flash looks? First things first everything I have ever learned about using a flash, I have learned FROM THIS SITE. It's the best resource out there. They should have their own TV show on TLC. Someone make this happen.

Like everything in photography there are many approaches to getting desired results, so keep in mind anything I suggest, there are 20 other ways to do it. For me, it is important to have total control over my source light (my flash), and especially at a wild dance party I want to be able to move my light around easily and redirect the wash of light where I want it as subjects whip and spin themselves around. When you are using a bright ass flash in a very dark room, it is very easy to use it to paint your subjects with a wash of beautiful glowing soft light, and create a nice rich contrast by making the background go stark black. So for me, I couldn't live without having my flash on an external cord. I live by the cord, it is a life saver for me. There are a few ways you can get your flash away from your camera and in your hands to wield as you wish. For me I don't mind having it on a cord. They range from fifty bucks to a hundo. Depends on your camera, and how you feel about buying pro end gear.

The drawback with having your flash in one hand, and the camera in the other, tethered together on a cord is-- focus! Ugh, it is cumbersome if you need to make a major adjustment to your focus, so make sure you have big hands. OR, you will figure out ways to maneuver both. It does take a little getting used to, so don't be surprised if you run with this setup for the first time, and hate it. For me the results are worth the trouble.

The other essential for me is diffusing the light coming out of the flash, so I run with a handy little medium sized soft box that mounts very easily onto my Speedlight. They are also reasonably priced, between eight bucks and seventy. There isn't much to get into with this, they mount easily onto your flash with velcro tabs, they fold down flat and fit easily into your bag, and they can work well in this situation, but there are limits. They are not great/bordering on useless for full body and large group shots, there just simply isn't enough coverage. It's important to know your limitations of your gear when you approach a shoot. So for this party situation, I know that I want to stay tight, get close, and make faces pop, since the coverage is all about capturing the fun and seeing who was at this event. So the mini softbox is essential in this instance, because I am shooting in a giant cavernous ballroom with nothing to bounce light off of, the walls are a mile away, and the ceiling is too high, so in these situations if you are used to just bouncing your light around to clean it up, you're out of luck. Another important thing to note, is that I dial down the power on the flash to 1/8 power so that I can get the flash super close to my subject and the background remains unaffected, that way I can have that nice clean super black dead space as a canvas, and if anything sneaks in it is minimal and simple to clean up in photoshop.

** On the crowded dance floor I tried to shoot from the inside out, so that I was shooting into the void, rather than into the crowd. It helps keep things clean and prevents any ridiculousness in the background making a great shot feel awkward, remember people are dancing and sometimes dance-face caught at the wrong moment isn't flattering.

Another important thing to note is that I shot these images on my monochrome setting, I bumped up the contrast, and added hints or tints of color all in camera to get the desired effect I wanted. In the first example photo below, I had added a little pink, and then switched to more of a gold tint. I felt like the gold look fit more with the parties "sparkle" theme. Doing this made my post production ultra fast. I added a tiny bit of diffused glow at like 8% to enhance the soft light wrapped around the subjects, and I cleaned up some of the background with the clone stamp tool to keep that black background intact if I needed to. Other than that I was good to go straight out of the camera.

So here are a few shots as examples to this approach. I couldn't shoot from far away, because my light wouldn't reach. So I knew I had to be close to use my flash setup properly. So I mounted my camera with a small zoom 17-55mm so I had the ability to dial out and squeeze in a few people, or zero in and make some nice portraits of just one subject.

Maegan

Georgia

Alli

Eden

Kelly

And yes, sometimes, JUST sometimes, you can get away with a winner of a shot when you simply hoist all your gear into the air and aim it into the middle of the party and fire away. I got lucky this time, I don't encourage this approach, but it can yield some good results if you aim right. Notice the falloff in this last photo, how quickly that light falls apart and goes black, again works wonders for small groups, and single shots, but it can still produce good images, in this case since I was farther away and holding my camera and flash in the air, I increased the power on my flash to give me some more punch.

pictured on the right Liz (Mom-101) and dancing friends Yvonne and Betsy

** I also set some rules up for myself when shooting in a party setting, if someone ducks away from the camera I don't shoot at them. I'm not there to ruin anyones fun or make someone feel uncomfortable. It's obvious but finding the people that are dancing like nobody is watching will always end up being the best subject for a photo, because they are able to just do their thing without feeling self conscious enough to stop what they are doing and pose. It should feel like you're dancing with them, not stopping their fun for a picture.

Hope this was helpful. To see all of the pictures from the party you can do so HERE. and a giant thank you to Tracey and Amy for bringing me in each year for this.

ALSO- Was this post helpful in anyway? Would you like me to do this more often? Was this too basic? Not enough details? Just shut up already and post pictures of your adorable children?

Morning Hair & Marker Caps

2011-08-07T11:00:00.005-04:00

When people ask: "well what do you miss about them?" I would never think to say: "Morning hair and marker caps" but these are precisely the kinds of things that come into my head on plane rides home when I sit blinking out the window. The next time I fly, I'll be thinking of Cole and how gorgeous she is each morning, big funny thick pretty hair, sleepy eyes, and playing with Tessa, (who woke up at 5AM today to see me). One of the first things Tessa told me this morning was that she had "hut myself." Apparently while Cole stocked The Littlest Buddy up on his small fortune in school supplies, Tessa got some fancy new coloring markers. The caps on these suckers are pretty seriously committed to staying on, and so she had smacked herself in the head trying to yank the suckers off when her hand would fly off the end and she would slap herself in the face. So she kept rubbing her head and telling me she "hut myself."

So as I sat there this morning laughing at the marker show, still tired from San Diego, loaded up with fresh stories to share with Cole about stuff like, Canadian friends, and a Black Hockey Jesus, hugs from Ree, meeting a Woolf, handshakes and back smacks, secret vodka stashes, theories on not carrying business cards, and so much more, I just kept thinking about how it's these funny little moments like morning hair, and watching Tessa fight with a marker cap that makes me hate being away.

Sometimes when I travel, I will notice the people sitting alone, staring off in a daze, and then their face suddenly breaks into a smirk like they just remembered the funniest joke, or the warmest memory, and I imagine they must be thinking of home, or someone they love. I mean, who knows they could just be sitting there thinking of a real good fart joke, or how crazy the stripper cops ding dong was on the second floor of the Keating hotel. Stuff like that. But I like to think they are thinking about people that love them.

Enjoy the marker show. No foreheads were smacked during the yanking off of this cap...

All Three

2011-08-03T00:00:00.002-04:00

Some of you long time readers might remember when everyone around here went click crazy trying to win Cole one of those gorgeous Madsen Cargo Bikes that she still dreams about. We did not win. Obviously. But that daydream of hers has held fast -- mainly because of The Littlest Buddy, we have not (as of yet) heard of any cases of kids with SMS that can ride a two wheel bicycle. Cole still holds out hope for LB, and intends to get him riding, but for now, he needs to stay attached to one of our bicycles somehow so they can all ride together. This is MY SETUP for him, that I have blogged about before. It is such a great bike for us, but there is no way to attach Tessa's bike seat to the back of it. The Madsen is still the dream bike, (I think. At least this week anyway) but I need to book a couple few more dozen jobs to make that happen. These cargo bikes are all so expensive. The one I liked the best was some European thing with a shark face and was like the price of a Hyundai.

It has been a really big deal to Cole to have a way to ride both of the children around on her bike when I am not home. I have been out of town on shoots a bunch, and so she has had to scratch bike ride off the list of fun stuff the kids do this summer. Which sucks because it is pretty much her favorite thing to do with them. So she has been obsessing over bikes. And I mean obsessing. This girl can talk about some freakin bicycles. Mostly those dreamy european numbers that have all the gorgeous accessories for toting numerous kids around on one frame. So she was so very excited to order this little bike seat doohickey from a UK company that attaches to her top frame, and that LB can comfortably perch on. Also comes with the foot pegs. Adorable.

She watched the mail for days. Pounced on this package when it arrived, and immediately fixed this seat to her bike, strapped LB in, and off they went.

Mission accomplished.

Oh and since we are talking about The Littlest Buddy anyway, the boy lost a couple things recently. Oh. My.

** P.S. I finally caved to pressures from online villains and got Instagram on my phone, I also decided to start a Tumblr site for it, inspired by my little buddy Mike who sent me a video clip of 300 kids chanting Rabbit over and over. He is out on the road this month with our friends and heroes Rabbit. I will be joining them later in the month to experience all of this adorableness first hand. It really is so cool they decided to spend their summer doing this. Their new album dropped today which you can find HERE Enjoy it with your family. It's perfect music for all of you together.

I am going to use this new Tumblr site to blog a little more leisurely and casual. It's just stuff that happens when my fancy camera isn't in my hands.

Hanging Around The Drawing Board

2011-08-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

When I was in CA on a job a couple weeks ago, for the first time I took along both my digital setups, and for fun I brought along my favorite image maker-- the Polaroid 600SE (The Goose). My job was to shoot the event, and to do some basic step & repeat shots at a fancy party, and then just shoot coverage of a bunch of hair stylists doing their thing. It's always an exceptional experience to be surrounded by a bunch of creative types being pushed to be more creative. While I was there I had a few extra minutes to shoot some of the presentation models that they used to parade around some great hair color. So I thought I would shoot one still image on film, and one on digital, and see which result I ended up liking the most.

All this experiment did was confuse me more, because I like them both, but for completely separate reasons, but it did keep me pointed down a path I have been standing in front of ever since I bought The Goose. I played with both images in post, limiting my editing to the bare essentials of a dark room, the exception being the gradient I laid down on the digital images. And that decision became the big difference maker for me. The film shots I liked right away, out of the camera, and after scanning felt like the only thing I wanted to do was make up for my terrible scanner. The digital shots on the other hand, I had this desire to keep doing shit to them because I could. There is so much latitude to make subtle changes, and the images are so clean, I feel like they needed some grit, and so I realized that I am always disappointed in my digital shots lately, I feel like they are never finished, because I want them to look like film, because once I started shooting The Goose, I want all my pictures to have that look. Once I started holding prints in my hand, I wanted to get that same feeling when I look at my pictures I take on my digital camera.

So I decided that the next job I get paid on, **tangent (which takes forever these days, anyone else in freelance notice that the 30 day cycle feels WAY more like the 90 day cycle, and all you do is watch the mail box and sweat it out while your bank account gets thinner and thinner, waiting for your damn checks to get to you? Anyone? I don't like it. Not at all.) So where was I? The next job I get paid on, I am going to buy a medium format camera and start down the path to making the switch to film full time. Just using my digital setup for video work. I think I have settled an old Mamiya 645 with the 80mm lens, you can always find one on ebay that is clean and fires right for around $500. It feels like a good start and a good workhorse to get me back into film mode.

With all the new technology being put into consumer cameras, I can see in a few years that point & shoots will be able to basically photoshop all your shots as you take them, and turn them into idiot proof perfect shot machines. I can feel myself wanting to just put my cameras down for a career, and concentrate on photography solely as a passion, and get back into the dark room. There is a really great camera shop, and dark room opening up here, that is totally affordable, and I am really excited to spend some time there. I would say 90% of the work I am asked to do in the last two years has been to make video, and I have really fallen in love with it. I would like to feel the same way about the photos I am taking.

Remember THIS POST? Well, I am excited to say that I have been planning ever since, and Cole & I and a whole team of creatives are going out the last 4 days of August to my favorite places in Florida to make some pictures. I got tired of sitting around and looking at magazines wishing someone would give me the chance someday to take shots like them, so I am going to go and prove to myself that I can shoot on a high level. It's a big test. And I am so ready to take it. I'm not afraid of failing because I quite like the drawing board, every time you walk away from it, you get a little bit better.

Here are the shots that set me down this path.

These were taken on the Polaroid 600SE shot on Fuji FP 3000-B

These were taken on the Canon 7D

Fish

2011-08-01T09:05:00.003-04:00

When bath time is over, and I make my move to exit Tessa from the tub, she squirms away from my reach, and she cries and wiggles, and says, "No daddy. Stay in."

Tessa loves the water. She always has. She was born it. I think that matters.

So in an effort to make bath time with Tessa end in those magic belly laughs of hers, instead of tears, I started this thing with her where I tell her the towel is my fishing net, and I scoop her up into it out of the water and yell out, "Are you a fish? Or a little girl? Because I can't tell." and then I will say, "If you're a little girl and not a fish, then you surely have legs! Let me see you use your legs." and Tessa will start to dance like a maniac. And we laugh, and I say, "Oh there you are little girl. I thought you were a fish the way you love that water."

Despite the fantastic dancing, I still think that she is a fish.

Music by: Julius Airwave The song: Every Little Bit Helps

I love watching Cole and Tessa in the water together, sitting at the bottom of the pool filming the two of them. It just feels like she is getting her ready for great big things, it's gorgeous, the lessons seem more like play to me rather than "lessons," and the longer they spend time in the pool this way, the farther and longer Tessa ventures away on her own. Neither of us hover nervously like we used to. The hardest part of this has been letting her go off into the danger on her own. The key has been letting go just long enough for her to discover her power. She surprises us every single day.

I still worry about Tessa around so much water all the time, it makes me crazy, so Cole and I do what we can to get her as safe as we can, as soon as we can. She has a long way to go, but she is doing so good this summer. I thought I would update since so much fuss was made over her picture from last year floating like a champ.

Because I know someone will ask **This video was filmed with the Kodak PlaySport-HD in the wilds and unruly waters of Altamonte Springs.

Expectations

2011-07-29T11:20:00.004-04:00

I am breaking a rule today, I am writing about The Littlest Buddy, and for anyone that reads here that is part of the special needs community.

**If you are relatively new around here, The Littlest Buddy is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called Smith Magenis Syndrome. You can read about what it is HERE, and how we reacted to it HERE, and after all that if you are compelled you can go HERE and purchase a copy of Do Fun Stuff, a charity album that was made to raise money for new research. More about that later.

Cole and I recently had the pleasure of discussing The Littlest Buddies development on the phone with Dr. Ann Smith for a few hours. Ann is one of the original pioneers of SMS research and one of the geneticist's that made the discovery in 1982 of the deletion in chromosome 17 which is the culprit for all of the problems centered around SMS-- she has dedicated her life to putting this puzzle together. From the beginning of her research and caring for the first wave of diagnosed cases of SMS, Ann used to run a support hotline out of her own home, and would stay on the phone with frustrated and confused families, she would do what she could to navigate this syndrome with them. She continues to this day, despite her insanely busy schedule to make herself available to families in need. It's truly an amazing thing to get to speak to someone that intimately knows SMS. Let me say it again, it's absolutely incredible to have that kind of access to a Doctor that not only cares deeply about the person affected by Smith Magenis Syndrome, but also about the family. She has a warmth and a humor about her that makes you feel like, it's all going to be okay, we are in this together.

After speaking to her and hearing that she quite liked the way Cole and I had been handling some of The Littlest Buddies rougher moments in life, she felt like some of this information could possibly help other families. I have no idea if anything we do could help. It all seems silly when we do it, but it has worked for us. I think like most families navigating life with a person who has special needs there are many times throughout a day where you have a moment where you think to yourself, I can't believe this is what I have to do to keep things calm.

The Littlest Buddies entire life is based on rigid expectations that he places on his day, his night, his rituals. If something doesn't go the way he had envisioned or prepared his mind for, there is no telling what his reaction will be. His tantrums tend to stay on the light side, meaning just a lot of crying and carrying on, a small amount of hand biting and slapping, but nothing bloody. We have been lucky in that way. In our family, one of the things we were having trouble with was the "pop in" but really whether you have a special needs child in your family or not, who really likes a "pop in?" The older The Littlest Buddy gets the more he likes his day to go exactly the way he expects it to. So a sudden unexpected visit can really rile him up, so a quick impromptu visit would often leave our house in complete chaos for a couple hours. Most people know at this point that they have to call ahead, and it is very simple to just get LB excited about a visitor over the phone, this way he has time to prepare himself for a new person. We put him on the phone when they call, and he invites the person over, and it puts him at ease. As for the people that still manage to just randomly stop by, we created the do over. It started as a joke out of pure frustration. Cole had come home from work early, and just walked in the door, and LB freaked! He is slapping his head and saying, "no, no, no, no, no, no, mama." So Cole just looked at him and said do you want me to do that again? and he said "yes" through a bunch of tears. So she just walked right back out the door, stood outside for a few seconds, and I said: "I think Mama is home?!" and then she walked in the door, and he was happy, and yelled out, "Mama's HOME!!!" As genuine and sweet as if she had just appeared for the very first time.

So we tried this with anyone that popped in on us. We ask them to please get out of our house, and go back outside and we do a "do over." How this actually works I have no idea. I mean he is standing there and watches the person walk back out the door, stand outside on our steps and wait, and then walk back up and knock again. The key here is that we all pretend like this person just showed up, so we are all like. "OH hey!! Look who is here." Whether it makes sense to us or not doesn't matter, it calms him down instantly, and it's just based on him knowing exactly what will happen, and then it happening exactly that way.

Here is an example of how important expectations are to The Littlest Buddy. At night when he is the most anxious and wired, he looks for anything he can do to keep himself calm. He gets his calm of course from knowing the result of an action, so he started clicking his light switch on and off. Each time he clicked the switch, the light did exactly what he expected it to do, it went on and then off, and so then he decided this felt so good and soothing that he started doing it hundreds of times in a row. Non-stop. For hours. This felt better to him than sleeping did. So the lure of the switch, the comfort he felt from that clicking was better than sleep. Nothing we could say to him would make him stop doing this. I would lay in bed wide awake night after night listening to him click the light switch on and off. I finally had to go the hardware store and buy covers for the light switches to keep him from doing this so we could all sleep again.

As frustrating as it was, it gave us the best insight into what is soothing to him. It gave us the ability to manage his days better, knowing how crucial cause and effect is to him. Looking at his days with a set of his expectations attached to it is a huge alley to us. So really it comes down to planning and communicating well. A reoccurring theme amongst SMS families and something you often hear families vent frustration about is the feeling that they are "trapped" in a routine, or they are a "prisoner" to the schedule, they can't escape the rigid schedule they have to keep to avoid major disruptions, so simply making lists with LB and helping him plan his week, and then being sure to follow up on the planned events is a major help. For every new experience we build into the day, it has to be balanced by a certain amount of his comfort activities. Visual lists, and calendars, and post-it notes make these new things real events that he can prepare for. Simply building verbal excitement and lore of a proposed new thing doesn't do as much good, as showing him on a calendar, or going over a list he helped to write. The Littlest Buddy also has a cork board with all of his favorite things attached to it, Cole painted the words to his favorite things on wooden door hangers, like "ice cream" and "Wii Bowling" and "Swimming". We found out that having a physical representation for the things he likes to do was key in using his likes and interests as an alley to navigate the day. If he can physically see it be taken away for bad behavior, or granted a privilege for good behavior, he is more careful not to lose it, or diligent to gain it back.

This all feels preachy to me, writing this stuff out, anyone with a special needs child has their own way of managing a day and a night. What works for one family, will never work for another in most cases, because the kids are just so different. I do know that all of this boils down to making sure that a balance is found, and creating as many happy moments in a day as possible. The laughs, and the hugs, and the sweet moments that occur in a day are so essential to sanity and strength.

Most people have the ability to recover from broken promises and disappointment from unfulfilled expectations, regardless of how easy it might be for us to move on from something not going our way, you still feel it in your head and your gut, and it stays with you. I am still feeling like a huge failure from a built up expectation I had from a job I lost, it has been months, so I keep all of that in mind when dealing with LB. When his emotions seem the most illogical and frustrating, I just remember that he is acting out emotionally exactly what I am feeling inside my guts when something I was really planning on and hoping for doesn't happen. My personal reaction to it, just might be to be kind of a dick, to be silent, stay in my head, be grouchy. LB just happens to react with emotional outbursts that he can't control. So give him something he can control and it calms him down.

I mentioned at the top I would say more about the charity album "Do Fun Stuff" it has almost been a year since the release, and after that one year mark, I will be donating the total amount of money earned to Dr. Ann Smith to help fuel along a case study she is in the midst of. It feels so tremendous to be able to hand over funds that will go towards hard research. So there is still a little time left before that album turns one, and if you are just now learning about this album. Please take a visit and you might just like the album enough to buy it anyway, regardless of the charity. There is also a place to make a separate donation of any desired amount located on the official "Do Fun Stuff" widget, it is a link to PRISMS who has been accepting donations on behalf of this fundraising effort. it's right there at the bottom of the monster, on the right side. Every little bit helps, and every cent goes to the charity.

For those of you who helped make this album a huge success, and helped to spread the word, a "Do Fun Stuff Vol. 2" is indeed in the works. I decided that I wanted to see what a release would do closer to the holidays :) So stay tuned as that develops.

If anyone is curious about how other families are dealing with SMS you can also read HERE about a wonderful family that is figuring out these challenges as they go day to day and doing a really fantastic job of keeping their spirit and making their kids lives as rich as possible. Their Little boy is around LB's age and it is spooky sometimes how much they look and move the same.

Sorry, your browser does not support iframes.

Burn

2011-07-27T10:08:00.001-04:00

Since we have been on the topic of keeping our kids safe, happy, and healthy around here the last couple days, and it is obvious that we all have that in common no matter what approach we are taking, or what we are dressing our kids in, or letting them watch on television, the bottom line is we love our kids passionately and do our best at raising them. Besides the princess culture issue that has been discussed the last two days, I also wrote of my concerns about food in the same posts, and touched on my worries about eating, and so... I wanted to share this project that was sent to me last week. After one viewing of this project teaser I was really taken by the story of the farmers in Haiti.

After Haiti was devastated by earthquakes, America sent all kinds of help. How many people had heard the story of starving farmers in rural Haiti rejecting some of the aid they received from the U.S. that came in the form of 475 tons of hybrid genetically modified seeds from the corporation Monsanto? How many people followed the story of the Haitian people rising up and burning these GMO seeds in protest? What do they know that we don't? How many farmers here in America wish they had that same power to reject these seeds now?

THIS PROJECT is a great example of how quickly things can turn, how rapidly happy nostalgia from our pasts can change, the simple act of eating food has become cloudy and complicated in America. How did the consumer get in the position where they were denied the right to know what goes into a food product? What was once "just fine" for us, isn't the same for our kids any longer.

GMO Film Project Sizzler from Compeller Pictures on Vimeo.

How great does this look to you? I certainly want to know more about it. This is something that I don't want to just shrug my shoulders at and assume everything is going to be totally cool with what's going on with our seeds. So if you are interested at all, I am encouraging anyone that shares that same curiosity for a closer look to visit this film makers Kickstarter page for more info and to donate to the project so this film can be made in its entirety. TAKE A LOOK HERE. It's important thoughtful work and I am really happy to see the story of these farmers in Haiti being told, people who know suffering in a way most of us will never know, but still will not just buckle to the power of Monsanto.

**To wrap up thoughts on this Princess debate that has been going on, I want to offer this up, this blog is largely my voice just trying to figure things out as they come up, as life unfolds. If I read a book that stirs me up like Cinderella Ate My Daughter and I start thinking heavy on a subject that I might not have ever worried about before, and then write about it, I'm not telling anyone that I am right and they are wrong, I am sharing my experiences as they unfold. If like minded people read here, it might be something that they enjoy reading and doing their own digging around on the subject. If I make mistakes, I blog about it, if I feel like the wool is being pulled over my eyes, I blog about it. If I feel like I drank too much Kool-Aid, I blog about it. The same goes for this GMO project that I featured here today, I don't know very much at all about it, but I really want to. I am intrigued. I am hungry for answers and theory and absolutely want to know what I am really buying at the grocery store. Undoubtedly there will be people that read here that know a lot about it, some that think it is safe and we are silly to fret, others that think it is the devil, and both sides will insist they are right. This is the internet, the second you give an opinion or take a stance, someone is there to tell you that you're wrong, and in the worst cases tell you that you're an idiot. I made a choice to give an opinion about something, and explore a touchy subject, we are not all going to agree, but I do thank you for being polite during the discussion.

Just like the Princess debate, this food topic is a serious and important one to me, and over the months and years of raising kids, I will be learning what i can and making the best decisions I can along the way. Do our best. That is what we do.

About Yesterday

2011-07-26T08:55:00.001-04:00

I need to start by being very clear.

Tessa has a favorite toy. She loves it. It's the closest she ever got to self soothing, no thumb sucking, or blankets, or bottles, or pacifiers, she never used any of that stuff. No idea why. It was all around waiting for her to pick it up if she needed/wanted it. She didn't. What she did do about seven months ago, was start carrying around a little brown haired doll, that wears a pink dress, and she named that doll "Honey." you should hear Tessa say "Honey" it's the sweetest thing in the entire world. Tessa plays with dolls, she has quite a few of them. We put them in the house with the rest of her toys for her to discover and make choices about. Tessa also wears pink. She owns a good amount of pink clothing, it's in her dresser with all the other colors she likes to wear. She has been pictured here wearing the color pink many times. You may have seen her in it.

I'm mentioning this, because my post yesterday had absolutely nothing to do with Tessa not being allowed to wear pink, or not being allowed to play with dolls. Nothing. Just wanted to be clear on that one.

Yesterdays post obviously sparked a lot of thoughts about raising girls, and I certainly wasn't writing a blueprint for anyone to follow. I definitely wasn't saying that I had answers, I was actually just talking about the questions that I have been asking, expressing worry and grief through humor, and sharing the path I took to get to some good info that I found. So I was kind of bummed to realize that most of the comments weren't about the actual post at all. I feel like most of it was the result of people not really reading the post, but simply reacting to what they perceived as an attack. It was like someone yelled "FIRE" in the comment section and then everyone else that came along was like, "what?! A fire?" and then started talking about what THEY did the last time they were in a fire.

Yes, the post yesterday did spur some lively discussion in the comment section, and thankfully so far everyone has been very polite, but it's getting defensive in there for sure. As the comments kept rolling in late into the night, my suspicions were confirmed and it became clear that people weren't commenting on my post anymore at all, they were commenting in defense of their own lives, and writing in defense of their own choices. Which made me sad, because it became really obvious that some people weren't reading at all, or in some cases, weren't getting what I was trying to say at all. It's hard for me to be clear, when I am using blogging to work things out. This is a place that thankfully feels safe enough that I can think out loud when something pops up that worries me about parenting, or my career, or my marriage, and hopefully what happens by blogging here is that I learn from others as the thoughts really take full form. So I am writing all of this to say that I will be happy to continue the discussion in the comment section of that post further today, IF it is actually about the post, and not about how wonderful and happy you and your children are playing with dolls, and how you have remarkably turned out "just fine."

The funny thing about all of this discussion is, that Cole has completely separate reasons for not wanting the princess culture in Tessa's life, and she is also hoping that it isn't embraced, however if she were to write a post on the topic it would be entirely different from mine. I just happened to get lucky that I married someone that also wasn't excited about the culture, but for her own very different reasons. So it isn't entirely fair that she is all entangled in this with all my opinions. To put it simply she hates it because to her it is just terrible taste, the clothes are poorly made, and look cheap, to her it's just straight up tacky. I am sure that's not going to go over well with some people, before you get hurt feelings, or feel attacked, she isn't saying pink clothes are tacky, she is talking about the princess gear, most of it is cheap material, poorly made, sold just as inexpensive as they can sell it, easy for mass consumption and priced low enough that it is hard to say no to when kids beg for it. Whether you like the stuff or not, you can't deny that. It is made for one purpose, to offer up the illusion of high quality at a cheap price. It's just her opinion that you may or may not agree with. I have never heard Cole pass judgment on other people for their choices, but at the same time, she isn't going to put Tessa in something that she thinks looks like crap. So she doesn't do it. So in this case although we have different reasons for not liking it, the result is the same. We avoid it.

As for the dolls and toys and fairy princess side of things, Cole would just rather be outside, on a bike, in the pool, at the lake, in the grass, so it isn't so much that she hates playing princess, she just never slowed down for it. She doesn't think about the evils of the princess culture and where it all leads, she just wants to play with her kids, and so her influence over the children is not based on parenting books, or stewing over worry like I seem to get caught up in. This is precisely why Cole is so good for me. Why she keeps me so grounded and so very calm. (she had the word "calm" inscribed into my wedding ring) So far we have made a good team, because there has been a good balance.

I would be happy to hear about anything related to this discussion that does not involve the idea that there is nothing to worry about, because you turned out "just fine."

The most consistent theme in the comments have been about balance and I couldn't agree more, and I appreciate anyone that takes the time to stop and read here, and to chime in on these kinds of discussions. I will offer up an apology to anyone that felt attacked or like I was trying to make you feel bad for your choices. It's tough to write about things like this without offending people. We are all so different and there is no perfect all knowing one way of doing any of this. With that said, it doesn't mean that tough topics shouldn't be talked about.

The Mountain Lion Panther With Rattlesnake Arms

2011-07-25T10:07:00.002-04:00

I walk around with a load of fear when it comes to the kids and keeping them safe, and the big list of worries keep getting bigger, it's to the point now where I can't even sit down and have a meal without worrying about all the GMO's and cancer-sugar loaded up in all our food. It's just hard to relax lately, anyone else feeling like this? There aren't many activities left where I can just sit back and relax without some scary news story rising to the top of the experience. Look at this lake picture I have posted from yesterday for example. Tessa was stomping around the shoreline amazed at the sand squishing between her toes. With every stomp of her foot and each little puff of sand that would stir up and then settle, it would elicit an adorable grin, and all I could think about was, "I wonder how hot that water is right now? What was the water temperature in the lake at today? If it got above 90 then there is a good chance that the super deadly flesh eating amoebas are active and swimming into that little cut she has on her foot?! And OH MY GOD GET HER OUT OF THE WATER!!" Can we go one summer in Florida without the scary lake amoeba story hitting the news?

So yeah. I keep all of this paranoia and the skittish voices contained in my own head as much as possible, I squash it all down, try and process the real stuff, like teaching Tessa how to swim and be safe around water, but really high five myself everyday for how much I don't let the fear rule our lives. She gets to play in the lake, and she has so much fun she doesn't even notice the white knuckles and nervous grimace, but I don't usually voice my fears to the kids or force them in a certain direction from things I perceive as potentially harmful.

UNTIL...

Recently a little four year old girl has come into Tessa's life, she has been around Tessa now for the last week or so, and it wasn't until this other little girl came around that I really noticed how tight of a ship I have been running on what Tessa is being exposed to. Ya see this other little girl came rolling up on her bright pink Disney Princess bike with a love for dolls, and Justin Bieber, and adores pink and fluff, and anything and everything princess related. My fear was confirmed one day after swimming the other morning, this little girl had a towel wrapped around her shoulders like a cape, and she began to spin around in sloppy circles and proclaimed gleefully, "I'm a princess!" and I said, "Oh really? A princess? And what does a princess do? What is her job?" and she said after some very hard thought... "To be pretty!"

So as I watched this joyous little girl spinning and giggling and pretending to be a princess-- I could feel my grip on Tessa get a little tighter. It was like I was walking along on a gorgeous mountain trail with my daughter enjoying the view away from the dangerous world we had left behind, and we suddenly came across a mountain lion panther that had giant fangs, and rattlesnakes for arms.

Of course it didn't help that I had just finished reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter on the plane ride home from CA. This book is a must read for parents of little girls, and it just backed up everything I had ever worried about since writing THIS POST about my annoyance with the pink culture when Tessa was just a few weeks old. So all of this was fresh in my head, and like some crazy test from the universe, this little girl drops into our life, and she is armed to the teeth with barbie dolls and princess powers.

The other day I ended up watching both the little girl and Tessa for a couple hours, and I ended up losing count of all the things that I was saying no to, "Sorry, Tessa doesn't watch the Disney channel." or "You know what, let's play something else, Tessa is too little to play that game" How do you explain to a four year old that Tessa is too little to play with princess toys? or "No sorry, Tessa doesn't eat candy for snacks." It was honestly like I was being tested, and everything I have been trying to avoid and keep out of her path showed up in the form of a fun little four year old girl that wants to play. All of the sudden I am this old jerk slapping hard candy out of her hand and covering her eyes and ears when the princess talk starts.

So you know what I did, I took Tessa home, and that night when Cole was at work, I ordered a Princess movie for us to watch together. I rented that Disney flick "Tangled" to see what Tessa would think of it, and guess what?! Tessa hated it, she was bored out of her mind. She stopped watching it after 30 minutes. And all of the sudden I was the one spinning around the living room like a princess because I was so happy. Tessa just last week sat and watched all of Megamind, and laughed and grinned the entire movie. Tessa is really expressive with the looks she will shoot you, and I couldn't have been more proud when she climbed down off the couch and looked over at me and flashed me a look in the middle of "Tangled" that was like, "What the F is this junk dummy, I'm doing something else!"

This is going to be really hard for me, fighting this princess culture bullshit, I have to try and figure out how to navigate this junk. It's easy when I'm slapping candy and junkfood out of their hands, because I don't feel any guilt at all when I'm protecting the kids from terrible food. This princess thing is way harder to explain, and at the same time, I am way more afraid of her falling in love with it simply because she is being denied it. So there is a fair amount of Cole and I letting her explore this world if she wants to. I hate that it exists. I hate that it is so saturated into our culture that it can't simply be sidestepped. It's everywhere. It's gotten to the point now where if it's food, and there is a cartoon character on the package, it's poison. And it would seem like people are trying as hard as they can to ruin any chances kids have at just playing with toys without worrying about if it is a girl toy or a boy toy, or if they are supposed to be playing with something bases on its color, or what character it is pimping. I tried buying a kid sized fishing pole for Tessa the other day because we wanted her to be able to fish with LB, so we go to the toy store and my choices were Barbie (bright pink) or Transformers. So we bought the Transformers one because it was black, and we peeled all the stickers off of it. Why make a gender neutral product that can be shared and passed down, when brands can make it so that you have to buy the exact same thing for each child, but painted up the gender acceptable colors. It's bonkers. All of it. The thing that makes me the most upset is how it makes me sound as a parent.

All of the sudden I'm the asshole walking around saying things like: nope she doesn't watch that, she doesn't eat that, she doesn't play with those, we don't sing Hannah Montana songs, she doesn't eat candy for breakfast. It goes on and on. The things going on the shelves in America marketed to kids is creating a bitterness inside me that I can't quite control. I wanted to write this post so I could let off some steam and have a laugh and all it did was get me discouraged. I hate that as parents we are put in the position to look like assholes for saying no to things that just aren't good for them. I don't want my daughter to resent me because I didn't let her drink sugar water with red dye in it, or let her wear makeup when she is 4, or dress up like a princess because it's her job to be pretty. When the kids are outside playing in the pool, or fishing at the lake, or outside in general just rolling around in grass or splashing in puddles I feel like they can just be kids. I feel like we are all happiest. None of this requires toys, or an appropriate color scheme or movie theme, it's just fun. They get to just play. So I suppose we will stay outside.

On Assignment

2011-07-19T04:00:00.003-04:00

I always feel unglued when I am away from my family. I know that if someday I get to be that super eccentric (and I say "eccentric" but mean total pain in the insistent ass that my family is with me) photographer that gets hired to do fabulous photo shoots all over the world, I will be the one that can't operate without insisting on bringing my family along. I just do better when I am at home, and if they are with me, then I will feel at home. I am almost done with my jaunt to So-Cal and have to say that sitting by a fire overlooking the Pacific Ocean on a chilly night in July indeed feels a million miles away from my family sweating it out in Florida. I just want them with me. Tonight was the first time I called home and Tessa said " I miss you".

My dream is to be able to do shoots with Cole, she will do the hair, and I will take the photos, and the kids will be with us wherever we are. We are way past the crossing the fingers and the pillow talk, and deep into the action of realizing these things.

Today Cole starts back full time at the salon, and I will be home with the kids WAY more often. So these trips around the map will be happening less frequently while Cole takes hold of her passion. I wrote about it HERE in case you missed it. I am so excited for her.

I know in my heart that this is the path to the both of us working side by side on projects.

From Our Table (a piece for Kinfolk Magazine)

2011-07-18T06:00:00.002-04:00

You know how you find blogs sometimes that will make you kind of pause and linger over their posts, not just their words, or the photos they present, but the blog itself actually puts out a very real vibe that makes you want to hangout longer, take closer careful looks... they have an energy to them. It's comforting, it feels familiar, soon you start thinking to yourself, "if I met this person in real life, well then maybe we would become good friends." Well-- there is this fellow Nathan that blogs at a place called Hear Black that was like that for me, and then one day to my surprise I received an email out of the blue from him, asking if I wanted to participate in a community project he was putting together called Kinfolk, and I immediately said YES! I knew from his blog that whatever he was a part of would be done with care, and heart, and pride, and would be presented as flawlessly as the rest of his work I had seen. And what has come together over the last few months, the people that he has attracted and attached to this project, is one of the finest talent pools on the internet I think. If you have not had the chance to see the new online magazine Kinfolk, please go there now and look, but go when you can actually spend some time with it. It isn't something to just glance at and scroll at, really take a good long look at it. You won't be disappointed.

For those of you who are not familiar with Kinfolk magazine, here is a copy of their manifesto: " Kinfolk is a growing community of artists with a shared interest in small gatherings. We recognize that there is something about a table shared by friends, not just a wedding or once-a-year holiday extravaganza, that anchors our relationships and energizes us. We have come together to create Kinfolk as our collaborative way of advocating the natural approach to entertaining that we love.

Every element of Kinfolk – the features, photography, and general aesthetics – are consistent with the way we feel entertaining should be: simple, uncomplicated, and less contrived. Kinfolk is the marriage of our appreciation for art and design and our love for spending time with family and friends."

Below are a group of photos I took that are a result of the piece I turned in for Kinfolk. Nathan had asked if I wanted to send along some ideas for the magazine, and after some thought I hoped that he would include a section for families. Having children does not mean that you have to start eating beefaroni, or Hamburger Helper every single meal while sitting in front of the television watching Sponge Bob marathons. The dining room table is so important to our family, and we try hard to make dinner time fun, and consistent, a place to laugh, and catch up, and of course to learn to appreciate food. So I am so very honored to have contributed a piece in the first issue of Kinfolk that focused on the family. Below are the outtakes from the dinner, that did not make it into the final piece, but that I wanted to share with all of you. I am not a foodie, and am out of my element taking pictures of meals. It was the actual preparation of our traditional Fl themed feast that made it into the magazine, I had been dying to smoke my own mullet (one of the finest Florida delicacies to ever hit your lips), and share it with Cole and the kids, and I was really happy with my first attempt at this old custom. I am thinking about retiring and getting a little road side stand and selling smoked mullet like my friend from the Pan Handle Fred.

Enjoy the outtakes, and then please do yourself a favor and check out all the gorgeous work turned in by some extremely talented artists over at Kinfolk Magazine.

The Menu: Fresh caught mullet Smoked to a fine smokey fresh smoke, Skillet Baked Macaroni & Cheese, Asparagus (recipe we tried from Seven Spoons), Florida Blue Crab boil (with smoked sausage, corn, potatoes, & artichokes), hone cornbread muffins, and for dessert... homemade delicious bready wonder Peach Cobbler.

Watching The World

2011-07-16T07:25:00.001-04:00

I have been lucky to get to know some of the guys behind the film project One Day On Earth a little bit over the past year. I do know how hard these guys are working to give respect to the thousands of filmmakers that contributed to this project, they pour over the footage and are constructing a sensational and compelling look at our world. When I see footage from this project I always have an emotional reaction to it. A little ball of fire that wakes up and moves around my guts and ends up in my throat. I am not completely sure what causes this, perhaps gaining the perspective of how infinitely small my little patch of life is in this sea of people, realizing just how many differences there are between us, but how we are all fueled by the same basic emotions and wants which bond us in a truly unique way. We can relate to one another on so many levels, knowing what great love feels like, or deep sorrow. Watching this trailer takes me out of my own little bubble here, and no matter what I might be feeling at the time about my own life and situation, I feel strangely connected on a scale I have never felt before. Simply put, I am moved.

I wanted to leave this trailer up this weekend perhaps for some people to discover the enormous effort being made by the One Day On Earth team to bring this film to life and to honor the contributors that made this film possible. Please give the trailer a look when you can, and take a close look at the One Day On Earth Kickstarter page which is located RIGHT HERE.

On a personal note, I am home from my shoot in NYC, I got in late last night while the kids were asleep, and so I was so very happy to wake up to the kids excited to see me. It's such a funny feeling to be missed the way a child misses you. That smile is one of the truest things on earth. Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

Rabbit!

2011-07-12T09:38:00.004-04:00

band photos by: the talented John Logan

Almost all of the music that has been used in the video work that I post around here, including the new book trailer for Design Sponge, has been written by my friends in the band Rabbit! It is the same friend who wrote the song Magic! for Cole that is featured in her maternity series video. That friend is Devin Moore who has been my good buddy since we were little kids, and he was the one friend who said he wanted to grow up and be in a band for a living, and he actually made that possible. So he remains one of my biggest heroes for his determination, and stubbornness, and drive, and it's people like Devin that keep me driving toward my goals.

**This post is for anyone around the United States that might know of opportunities for the band to help out communities, camps, schools, art centers, anywhere that funding has been zapped from arts and music programs. Let me explain how you can help and get involved with the band and what they are doing.

I wanted to spread the word about the bands tour going on this summer, (the dates are posted above in their poster) because there might be some great opportunities for some of you to get involved. When Rabbit decided to tour this summer, it began like any other band discussion about touring: where they should go, where they would play, how nobody knows who they are so who will actually show up? They have toured in various projects countless times, and had the same great experiences on the road, so when they designed this latest tour they wanted to do something different, and they made the decision to dig deeper into the communities they were stopping in. Rather than simply show up, play a show and move on, the band wanted to take the opportunity to spend their days doing what they could for struggling and strapped music and arts programs for kids. So as much as they have been able to do on their own, they have booked shows at art centers, and day camps, and have a show and program that they put on just for the kids. They are doing what they can while they are out on the road to help where they can.

So this post is a call for help to anyone that might be involved in any programs along the bands tour stops that they could get involved in. You can get in touch directly with the band and see about scheduling a show for them to play. It's an awesome fun show that will expose your kids to a hands on music experience that they will always remember. So if you work at a community center, or day camp, or school, or you are involved in any kind of arts and music program and would like to have the band come in for the day. Check out their tour schedule and if they are coming to your city, or near your city, please reach out to the band and see what they can do. Get in touch with them HERE! and write to Ashton or Devin and say hi, get a conversation going. Or give them a shout on Twitter, they are watching their stream for any opportunities to help out and get involved.

If you are not familiar with the band, you can visit their site HERE and listen to some songs. ALSO you can read their ownBLOG and see what they have been doing on the road so far, they have interviews, and videos of their show, and loads of good info about what they are doing.

Here is what others have said about the band: Rabbit!, a Florida-based indie-pop band, has figured out that mixing guileless, endlessly hooky songwriting to throbbing rhythms and toy keyboards is a masterful key to success. This is not profound music (the band seems to make that clear with its cover of The Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”), but the alternating male-female vocals and infectious energy, even on the slower numbers, pushes both band and audience along by sheer, sugary-sweet melodic pop goodness. And sometimes that’s all that matters. K. Petersen Columbia Free Times

AND

**For anyone in the NYC/Brooklyn area I am going to be in the city on Wednesday the 13th and will be going to see the band play at Union Hall in Park Slope. HERE is the info for the show. Who is coming with me?! Anyone? It will be good fun.

So check out the poster that is sitting at the top of this post for tour dates and if you have any interest at all in getting the band involved in your community please reach out. Also i am sure the band would be happy to do any interviews for any bloggers looking for something cool to write about this summer. So just reach out.

ANYONE that might know of friends, or family, or fellow bloggers that could use an opportunity like this for a camp, or a program, please spread this post around. Get the word out. And thanks a bunch.

Belief

2011-07-11T09:25:00.002-04:00

Taken with Polaroid 600SE on Fuji -FP100 B pack film

You ever just lay around in your backyard in the middle of sweaty summer and daydream about all of the things you will do someday to make it your very own little backyard paradise? Cole and I did this on Saturday during Tessa's nap time and the conversation quickly became a shower of "and thens" all based on the assumption that success will come to us, and we will eventually be able to afford to do things like dig swimming pools, build a little greenhouse, and secret forts for the kids in the garden. Every inch is planned out, leaving just enough of a grassy patch to lay around on in summer so we can daydream about the next batch of big wishes.

All I could think about when I was laying there across from Cole in the grass, (and actually got myself to stop staring at her waist for 5 seconds) was how easy it is to build a life with her. With the kind of work I do, whenever we plan for the future and discuss how we will eventually afford to do these big things like build our dream backyard, I don't have the kind of job where the solution is to ask for more hours, or get a raise, or bust my butt for a promotion, or a X-mas bonus-- I have to come up with new ideas that excite people. So whenever I start yapping about movies I want to make later in the year, or some grandiose 20 step photo project that sounds crazy even in my own head, Cole never thinks for a second that it isn't completely possible. She treats all of these plans I come up with as if they are completely possible and sane and speaks about them with this amazing tone like " of course it will happen." So in turn whenever she looks at me and says, "I think the pool should go right here." I say, "of course it will honey." as if being able to afford a swimming pool someday is an actuality and not a pipe dream.

It's her absolute belief in me that makes us able to live the life that we have, and so of course laying around in the middle of hot ass summer in the backyard with her talking about the future makes everything feel totally possible. Giving someone your complete support and belief in them is one of the most powerful things you can do, and so when I look at these pictures I feel like I can do anything. I guess I just wanted you to know what I see when I look into pictures like these of Cole. I wonder sometimes what other people see when they look into these frozen moments I share here in this space, and I hope that they can see everything that I do.

Fart Salad

2011-07-08T09:12:00.002-04:00

Cole and I made plans to have dinner with some brand new friends the other night, and when asked if there was anything we could bring, they said that: "yes, actually you could bring a salad to go with the meal."

Easy enough.

Now Cole and I have been on the friend hunt for awhile now, and it has been an awkward painful process-- especially for me. I'm not good at inserting myself into conversation, or doing the getting to know you thing with new people very easily. I was embarrassing as a single person and dating, ugh you should have seen me, and now I suffer from the exact same anxiety and shyness when it comes to making new friends. So I have been really excited and happy about this little family that lives just one street over from us that has a little boy that is Tessa's age. We like them, we really really like them, so we are in that beginning phase of hanging out, where we worry about ruining the relationship all the time. Where we worry about all of the sudden becoming listed as "a bad hang" and the invites stop to dinner and the playdates dry up, and then we are friendless all over again. So of course we took all of that unnecessary pressure and worry about being rejected by this couple and their adorable child, and we put all of the weight from our insecurity on the shoulders of the making of this salad. This salad over the course of just a couple hours became the linchpin of this new budding friendship. It somehow became the deal breaker.

Now I assumed that when someone says, "bring a salad" they mean a basic salad that you would order at a restaurant. a salad you would get with dinner at most places: some lettuce, a little cucumber, some tomato, maybe even a little red onion, or get really crazy and put some radishes on there. Simple, fresh, easy, safe. So when we are at the grocery store Cole says: "I'm going to make the salad!" and I was like "Really?!" because Cole never makes the salad. And I say, "Okay honey, knock yourself out. Make whatever you want." and she starts talking about this baby spinach, and egg, and mushroom, sunflower seed, salad that she claims is delicious. So the debate begins about the risk involved with a move like that. What if they don't like mushrooms? What if it is too nutty? What if they wanted a spring mix, or crisp romaine and not just straight ol' bitter spinach? Is there at least going to be any cheese in this salad?

The one thing I didn't think to worry about was the egg. So it's an hour before we have to go to dinner and Cole goes into the kitchen to make the big salad, and soon after is when I notice the smell coming out of the kitchen. As I walk past the kitchen, the smell hits me in the face and I'm like, "Oh my God! Did you fart?" and Cole is all, "Of course not, NO!" and then I notice that Cole was in there peeling the hard boiled eggs and breaking them apart for the salad. So I panic a little, "these eggs smell like gross musty farts. What's wrong with them? Do they always smell like this? Did you boil them right?" Now something to know about these new friends is that the woman is pregnant, and just now getting over being nauseated all the time. So I immediately launch into a rant about how she is going to take one whiff of this salad that smells like farts, and get SO sick feeling, that dinner will be ruined. "I can't believe you made a pregnant woman a fart salad! You know how sensitive smell is during a pregnancy! We just ruined dinner."

So Cole wraps up the salad and puts it in the fridge and says reassuringly that the smell will go away now that the eggs have been shelled and put into the salad. And I believe her. Now normally we would just walk over to their house, but it was raining, and we had the kids, and this big fart salad to carry, and so we decided to drive over to their place. We get the kids buckled in, and before we could even leave the driveway the whole car smells like a fart. "Great! Now we are all going to smell like a fart too." and that is when Cole starts to panic about the smell also, and she says, "oh no, she is totally going to get nauseous when she smells this. I can't believe this smells like this." And as we are pulling into their driveway Cole is all about hatching a plan to ditch this salad, and it was at this point that she suggests that I dump the salad out onto the driveway when I open the car door and pretend that I spilled it. She is like, "Just say we accidently dropped the salad and it's ruined and you can be out here sweeping it all up and apologizing." she adds, "Who would ever think we would do that on purpose? Just dump the salad."

There was not turning back. We made a risky move and had to live with it. We couldn't show up empty handed. The fart salad had to be served.

So we went into their house with the smelly salad, and handed it over at the door with a warning to avoid any direct inhalation upon first opening up the salad bowl. We came clean about the smell right away, that was the best approach, just be funny about the terrible smelling food, and to not sit there and pretend that it didn't stink. One of the things we love about this couple is their sense of humor and that they are very funny, and not long after arriving they were making a homemade "fart dressing" to go along with the "fart salad" that we all sat down and enjoyed with dinner.

Crisis avoided.

We still have new friends.

For now.

Dating is the worst!

P.S. Cole made me add this P.S. to add that the salad was very good. tasty some said.

Swinging In The Rain

2011-07-07T08:05:00.000-04:00

Last week Tessa turned two years old, and we had planned on swimming all day with the kids to celebrate since she has been having so much fun in the pool this summer. You should hear the way she asks to swim. Melts us to a gooey mushy mess, and we say "Yes! Of course you can honey."

So wouldn't you know it. On her birthday it decides to rain the entire day. Leave it to us to never look at the weather forecast ahead of time to plan anything. We stood there on the pool deck with our phones in our hands looking at the radar going, "What the shit is this? Not fair, NOT fair!"

So Cole just decides that she isn't going to let the rain damper the day and she slaps a swimsuit onto Tessa, and grabs the umbrella, and played outside with her in the rain all afternoon for her birthday. Cole took hold of the day and wouldn't let the rain get any of us down. I of course was immediately all grumbling, "this sucks" and complaining, but Cole kept her spirit and played and made it fun for all of us. I had to step back and realize that Cole was teaching Tessa how to make the best of life in any situation. She was teaching Tessa how to be awesome, how to be a bright light. So I melted back into the background and made sure that Tessa was absorbing and soaking up as much of Cole's spirit and life lesson as she could. There are definitely moments when I see myself being a terrible example and I have to find a way to be invisible for a few minutes until I can squash it and reemerge with a better approach. It didn't take long for Cole to rub off on all of us, and seeing Tessa play in the rain was so sweet that we all ended up having fun. It's impossible to stay sour when you hear the two of them laughing together, it has to be the closest thing to a magic spell there is, all of the darkness is pulled out of me, the big dopey smile starts to form, it stays locked on my face. It's magic.

In the end there was delicious cake, and presents, and songs, and family, and big laughs and giggle fits, and all of it on a dreary rainy day.

And just like that, we have a two year old little girl.

I Told You

2011-07-06T09:14:00.000-04:00

**This is a little story about my work on quitting the quitter in me.

Completely motivated by the will to utter the words "I told you I could do it"-- have you ever done something as an adult that you always wanted to do as a little kid, but had been told "NO you can't do it" sooo many times by your parents, that you actually believed that you couldn't do it? I'm not talking about things we were forbidden to do because it was stupid, jackass, or dangerous. I'm talking about physical things, or complicated projects that we were interested in at young ages and told: "no, you can't do this, you're too little, you won't finish it." So as adults that forbidding "no" stays in your head and then one day you just snap and decide that no matter how ridiculous it seems, no matter how juvenile, you are FINALLY going to do this thing to prove that you CAN do it! Then as soon as you're done you make sure you let your parents know all about it in a real immature bragging phone call. No? Nobody else has done this? Just crazy old me? Oh well.

Let me explain. 8 months ago I walked into the hobby shop we have here in town-- It's been here for years, it smells like old developer and film, my mother actually bought her first camera at the age of 20 at this very same shop when she lived here in town. It was the same hobby shop that I bought my first big boy camera from (I just found this out a week ago and love that we both bought our cameras from the same place). Anyway, I walk into the hobby shop to pick up a lens that I had been saving for, and I found myself wandering to the back of the store to poke around the model cars and airplanes and Radio Controlled racing section of the shop. I went looking to scratch an itch I have had since I was a kid. In the mid80's they had these amazing RC cars put out by this Japanese company Tamiya called: The Grasshopper, The Frog, and The Hornet, and I wanted one. My friends had them. They were fast, they were slick, they could jump jumps, peel out, they could go off-road, they were the fucking greatest thing on the planet to an 11 year old. I wanted one. I didn't get one. My parents had pegged me for being a bit of a quitter, and said that I would never put in the work to build the car. You see it didn't come all put together and finished. You had to build your own car. The entire thing. Every detail. Paint the body and the parts, build the gear box, the steering system, all of it. Without getting into a whole crybaby thing about my parents saying no to me, I was told no (looking back probably for a good reason). I have never stopped wanting this car. The same 11 year old kid urge I had to own this car has remained in my belly my entire life. I have considered buying this car a hundred times. Justified the purchase and then decided no, I am too old for a toy, this is dumb. For whatever reason 8 months ago, I decided it was finally time.

So I bought it. I bought it 8 months ago. And it sat in its box for 8 months staring at me. It had become, and had always been this complicated thing that I couldn't do, that I wasn't able to do. So I just let it sit there in the box and intimidate me, a stupid toy made me think I would just quit and give up. It made me think I wouldn't be smart enough or detailed enough to make this work. What if I put in this work and it wouldn't run? This unopened box had me thinking that my parents were probably right, I couldn't do this. So I didn't. What a loser right? So then a couple days ago for whatever reason on the 4th of July, I got up early and decided that I would make this car. I opened the box. I got out the tools. I read the instructions and I built this car. I did it. I finally did it. I knew I could do this :)

Boy I gotta tell you it felt great to put this car on the ground and gather Cole and the kids around, flip the power switch and watch this thing takeoff like a light. The kids immediately full of smiles and screams and reaching for the controller for a turn. Tessa was chasing it down the sidewalk, LB insisting on playing with it too, and you know what I said to him? The first real reaction I had that came tumbling out: "You're too little. You can't play with it."

:)

I heard myself say it. I cringed, and then I said: "You can drive the car buddy, we will take it to a park in a big open field where it can't possibly crash into anything solid." This car will become the kids car. I got what I wanted out of it. I just wanted to squash that feeling that I couldn't figure something out. Not sure why this one thing stuck with me all these years. It's always the strangest little things we harbor and turn into doubt and fear. How does this happen?

So my question today would be how many of you still hold onto things like this? Is it something specific? Have you conquered it? Did you call your mom and dad and tell them that you finally did it?! The only story I know that is similar is that I knew a girl who bought an Easy Bake Oven as an adult, and a bunch of the mixes they make for it, and she made the junky desserts because she was never allowed to as a kid. She couldn't shake the want. For Cole, she ALWAYS wanted to go away to camp for the summer, and to stay in a cabin with roommates, and learn to shoot a bow and arrow, and swim in lakes, and hike, and she still wants to go. She has already looked at possible camps to send the kids someday when they are older. Maybe she should be a camp counselor? Shit's as weird as my car thing right? But I love stories like this. It feels like letting go and squashing these little demons we create to hold ourselves back. It feels like growing up.

How to Keep Falling

2011-07-05T09:12:00.001-04:00

I was sitting with my family, we were in these comfy patio recliners by the pool, kicked back aimed up at the sky, Cole next to me, we each had a child wiggling around on our laps nervous and excited about the fireworks display bursting just over our heads. The blasts filled our entire patch of sky. You could see the fire bursts reflected in the lake, the booms bouncing all over the houses and back across the water. All the classic tunes were blaring in accompaniment: America by Neil Diamond, Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen, and American Pie by Don McLean. And as spectacular and American as it all was, I kept finding myself distracted from that spectacle, and instead kept looking down across the back lawn-- further away from us, closer to the lake, all across the grass were young couples on blankets, snuggled up, giggling, hand holding, kissing, lying on their backs with this awesome fireworks display exploding just over top of them, there is something just so American about ignoring the safe viewing distance warnings on a novelty explosive device and letting the sparks and cardboard shrapnel rain down on top of you. It was the perfect summer night, clear, a light breeze, fireworks were exploding all around the lake, it was romantic and sweet. And watching all of this I let something happen that has never happened before up until that point, never before had I given any thought or felt any jealousy at all to the fact that Cole and I never got to simply be a couple. Just the two of us. From the start it has always been just the three of us. And that night I let myself be envious for a second.

(** for any new readers, when I met Cole she was a single mama and LB was 3 years old)

I took this moment of envy as a sign that I haven't been making enough time for just Cole and I. That we don't exist as a couple outside of our roles as parents, and so I started thinking about a date night. I have always avoided a regular date night, because it seems so phony and forced to me, there seems to be no spontaneity in a regular night of dinner and adult conversation. Date night is as much of a rut as Taco Tuesdays can become. It feels pushy to me, it's date night so you better be ready to have some fun, no matter how your day went, and to do this every week?! It's like all of the sudden you're going: "Ugh, it's Tuesday again, I fucking hate tacos!"

I figured Cole and I would always just be responsible to our romantic relationship and create time to act on all of our impulses when they would build up enough. This has not been the case so far, we keep the babysitter busy with my trips out of town, but almost never for Cole and I to just simply reconnect. I figured out the reason for this. Our thermostat is all messed up...

When Cole and I were going to couples counseling our guy spoke to us about temperatures. Meaning what we are used to as a comfort level, what made us comfortable and secure as children, is what we grow to expect as adults. In my house my parents did not go on dates, we did not have a babysitter, if we went out, we went out together as a family. I can vividly remember a small handful of times my parents had my sister and I seated at a far away table from them at the Red Lobster so that they could dine in peace. My sister and I sitting there at a little two-top trying to get along, I wish I could remember what we talked about. I guess that was the closest thing I can recall that would resemble a date for my mom and dad. Now Cole on the other hand, her mom and dad dropped her brother and her off at their parents house every weekend, and they went out. They went out all the time. They went dancing, and had friends, and slept in on a Sat morning, and then went and picked Cole and her brother back up. So in this instance what Cole and I are used to, "our temperatures" for this are very different. So now we have to figure out the best temperature that will make us both happy.

I haven't even discussed this with Cole yet, I keep laughing imagining her reading this, going "What?! We're going to go out on dates?!" and immediately calling the babysitter to schedule a night. But before all that gets official I have questions, tons of them. How does this work, do you go out every week, on the same night? Does it get boring? Is it always dinner and a movie? Can you hangout with other couples on date night or does this defeat the purpose entirely? What happens if you're not in the mood for date night and you call it off, what does that guilt feel like. It's like saying, "I don't feel like being in love with you tonight." Geez the pressure! The whole thing makes me uncomfortable because I am not used to the temperature. See how that works, its like I'm sitting in a room that's 80 degrees and I feel like I'm on fire. I need a cool 75 to feel relaxed. Cole is wrapped in blankets when it's 75. See how this works?

Who can afford a weekly date night in this economy, I wonder if anyone has done a study to see how many married couples have had to cutback. Has this made the marriage in America suffer? How has this economy hit the babysitter sector? Are they suffering along with the rest of the country? Let's get these babysitters back to work people. My guess is that it has brought a little more of the family unit back together. Grandparents are back on top again. Do you find yourselves relying on your family more than you used to? Are we getting back to the tribe finally?

So far in my relationship with Cole, (and for the first time in ANY relationship as it is supposed to be), I find myself closer and more in love each month I am with her. So now that we are 3 years in, and we are starting to plan for another baby, I am feeling really anxious about preserving our romantic relationship. I want to preserve this upward trend, and my fear is that as soon as you let the couple fade, and solely focus on the parent partnership, the little line on the graph starts to trend down, and the romantic couple starts to die. I never want the "couple" part of us to get pushed to the back of the line and forgotten about. All of the sudden it's 10 years from now, and we're scratching our heads trying to figure out what happened? How did we drift apart?

So tell me all about date night. The pros the cons, the successes the failures, things not to do. I'm ready. I guess I am a convert, I see the light now, I am ready to be the couple that has an official date night.

Let it begin.

Grace

2011-06-28T11:12:00.001-04:00

I've been waiting months to write this post!

A few months back, Feb 3rd actually, someone on twitter made sure that I saw a tweet from big time blogger Grace Bonney of Design Sponge fame, she was asking for suggestions for videographers. Grace was on the hunt for someone to help her make a book trailer for her brand new super awesome big thick 400 page beautifully made design book called: Design Sponge At Home (it is being put out by Artisan in September). So I got brave and piped up, threw my hat in the ring, and asked people on twitter to pretty please let Grace know I was the right man for the job, and guess what? So many people got in her ear about me, that she actually took a look at some of the video work I have done, and she took a chance on me. I was so excited, Design Sponge is a favorite blog of Cole's so it was pretty exciting to get the email from Grace saying-- "please tell everyone on twitter to stop bugging me about you!" I'm kidding. Grace wrote and said hi, and a month later I am standing in her Apartment in Brooklyn with a camera, and we marched all over NYC, went into some incredible houses, tackled some at home DIY projects, and made one helluva a great trailer for her book.

I am so excited to finally show this video off. Posted below are some screen shots from the trailer, a teaser for the teaser. So today if you could do me a huge favor and head over to Design Sponge and take a look at the video it would mean a bunch. This was the first project like this that anyone has let me get my hands on, and I can't tell you enough how much fun it was to make.

So head on over to Design Sponge today and take a look at the trailer, and also get loads of good info on the book, it's release, and find out even more about what is going to be inside of it. Big huge thanks to Grace and Amy for being such great hosts, for letting me make this, and for showing me amazing sites in NYC. Grace took a chance with me and trusted me to capture her heart that she had put into this book, and I will never forget her for that. So excited for her and her entire team over at Design Sponge. The book is gorgeous. Go check it out.

click HERE to see the trailer. AND P.S. If you have time tell Grace and everyone at Design Sponge a big congrats on making such a great book.

I Love The Smell of Chlorine and Sunblock in the Morning

2011-06-27T08:21:00.000-04:00

it smells like victory.

Did you know Tessa turns TWO on Wednesday?! How exciting to have a two year old - "This is my daughter, she is two." I get to say that now.

We decided not to do a party again this year for her, and instead we are going to just keep doing what we have been doing with these summer days. She has been having so much fun, why ruin it with a party. We are really trying to squeeze the most out of this time off we have before everyone starts working again. This has been one of my most favorite summers of all time, but I feel like I keep saying that every year. Do I? I will have to go back and check my records.

We shipped ourselves away for the summer, and spend most of our time at "Camp Gido", where we have been making sure Tessa makes her full transformation into a fish, and that LB learns how to catch them. Between the pool, the lake, and the fluffy green grass, I'm not sure these kids are going to remember what shoes are. It has been a barefoot summer for sure.

The afternoon rain has been cooperating so far, and gives everyone a nice break and reason to get out of the water, and when the clouds start to break apart in the sky and the storms move off, it makes the sunsets over the lake really spectacular. Too bad we don't like to drink Corona, because every time at sunset when I walk by those two chairs pictured at the bottom of this post, I keep thinking that I am supposed to be sitting there drinking one, and toss my phone in the water.

** All photos taken on land with a Canon7D mounted with the 24mm 1.4 lens, underwater photos taken with the Kodak Sport underwater thingy, it's super fun.

Blame it On Swimming Pools & Berries

2011-06-22T08:03:00.002-04:00

**The photos of the kids in the garden were taken at my mother and father's place. They had blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and some grapes blooming and delicious in their garden.

Blame It On Sunshine & Ice Cream

2011-06-15T07:58:00.001-04:00

So what's the big huge delay exactly with getting Cole's blog up and running? Why is it taking so damn long? Well... I have received enough sweet inquiries about it, that I thought I would take today to sort of explain. To be totally honest it is hard to stay on task with everything we have going into this (overly ambitious) new blog, because we have days like yesterday-- Somedays you just want to lay in heat of the sun in some nice fluffy green grass, and then spend the afternoon teaching the kids how to turn a bowl of peaches into a bowl of sweet peach ice cream. The Littlest Buddy loved making this for everyone, and he did indeed do the bulk of the work. We lose our days to things like this ALL the time. Cole's father has had an ice cream machine collecting dust in his garage for the last 11 years, "The Il Gelataio (The Ice Cream Man)" and he just brought it over hoping someone would finally use it, so we have been sure to use it regularly. So with all that said, I wanted people to know that we are most definitely excited about making something cool to share online that focuses solely on Cole's passions, but it is going to take some time. Right now our big focus is on getting LB transitioned to summer and his new schedule, and making sure Tessa is safe in the water since so much of our FL summer is spent at pools, and lakes, and beachside. I am tackling swim lessons this year, and so far so good. She is kicking like mad, and blowing bubbles like a champ. So thank you for the enthusiasm about the new blog, and more importantly thanks for the patience. Enjoy your summer. They go quick.

Priceless First Attempts

2011-06-14T08:30:00.001-04:00

Don't you just love how hilarious and brilliant it is watching kids start to figure out how to do the little things that we do in daily life... How terrible they are at things at first, watching them reason things out, gears turning, fingers trying to find the finesse to maneuver new objects, their concentration faces. All of it is great theater, and this new little phase of growing up is so much fun to be around.

I have been watching Tessa try and clip her sunglasses onto her shirt for days now, and was lucky to catch her the other day in the middle of another one of her attempts. She knows that we take off our glasses and get them to stick onto our shirts somehow, she just hasn't quite figured it out exactly.

Enjoy the show.

I'm not usually one to go around giving out photo assignments, but for any of you parents reading along armed with cameras, try and do a series like this of your little one figuring something out for the first time. Not as in exercise in photography necessarily, it's just really funny to have. I feel like Tessa will laugh at this one pretty hard when she is all grown up. If you make one, be sure to link me to it.

TV Face

2011-06-13T09:46:00.000-04:00

I find it hard not to let Tessa watch more TV than she should because of how fascinated I am of her reactions from it. She is almost two and although she loves age appropriate shows, she also has become very fond of a cartoon called Adventure Time. (The Jiggler is one of her most favorite episodes, watch it) Now for those of you familiar with the show, before you get all hysterical about how I'm a monster for letting my little girl watch this kind of show, I just wanted to say, COLE LETS HER WATCH IT TOO! :)

That isn't what I wanted to add actually, (but it's true, she does) I have my reasons for exposing Tessa to Adventure Time, and although I know this is the kind of post that can end up going south with strong opinions, I wanted to offer up my reasoning behind it for a discussion. I am curious to see if anyone else out there is on the same tip.

I chose this particular cartoon and put it in the rotation simply because it reminded me of the kind of cartoon I grew up on. The characters are brash, and smart-alecky, and are prone to violence, I watched hours of Looney Tunes growing up, and not this new glossy prissy Looney Tunes they parade around. I watched the Looney Tunes where cats shot themselves in the head, and hung themselves, and pigs and ducks fought Hitler, and there was a mouthy rooster that repeatedly smashed a dog in the teeth with garden tools. These were cartoons that didn't have a disclaimer at the front of them about how educational and nutritious they were for the kids, they were just pure silly hearted ridiculousness. I think it is healthy to throw a little mischief and mayhem into the mix so Tessa knows what it looks like, and so I chose to let her watch Adventure Time for that reason. I remember when people first started freaking out about Looney Tunes and worrying about little kids hitting their siblings over the head with frying pans and the like. It got nuts, I guess the argument became that parents didn't want one more thing that they had to worry about. So here we are now decades later with an entire TV channel filled with cartoons made for little kids that don't use violence as a punch line, has it made things any better?

All I know is that Tessa watched one episode of that Ni Hao Kai-Lan show and it was 20 minutes of tigers and pandas acting like spoiled babies just so the little chinese girl could show everyone how it isn't cool to act like an asshole like that. All Tessa saw was a bunch of cute animals acting like jerks, and she didn't laugh once. I thought cartoons were supposed to be funny.

So I guess the discussion here is do you think that cartoons have lost their way? Have they just turned into opportunities to push the parenting agenda? Like everything else have we put so many pads and helmets and safety precautions on them, that these kid cartoons are just becoming preachy parenting moments packaged in cute animated voices? Isn't it our job to teach our kids not to act like little monsters-- now all the sudden I have Wow Wow Wubbzy helping me out with that one? I mean, I appreciate the help, it's cool that Wow Wow has my back, but sometimes I want Tessa to be able to sit down and just laugh at insanely impossible larger than life television. It has been my understanding that cartoons and television were made as an escape, a fantasy, cartoons especially were made to be funny. What's funny about these toddler cartoons on Nick Jr? I didn't tell Tessa what to laugh at, or coach her to like Adventure Time, she just gets it. It's freaking funny, and so she laughs. The jury is out whether or not she will wake up one day and hit me in the face with an entire garbage bag of hot butter for the ultimate prank, or want to build a never ending pie throwing robot that heats pies in its microwave belly so they are piping hot when they hit you in the face. If she does? I will help her make one of course.

Thoughts?

The Hair Show Floor

2011-06-06T08:26:00.002-04:00

It's 1AM and I just got home from Redken's yearly party they throw at Premiere Orlando and am downloading hundreds of grabs from the showroom floor and the model room, so while I wait for cards to unload, and hard drives to back me up, I thought I would put a quick collection of some of the sights that I see in a day at a hair show. How many of you have ever been to a hair show before? I encourage you to all experience it at some point in your life if you are a great lover of hair and hair salons. Picture every major hair/beauty brand, and then 200 you have never heard of, all showing off what they do, all at the same exact time. Yeah! It's bonkers. So here is a little tour through my lens. These are a mix of shots of a few of the L'Oréal brands: Redken, Pureology, Matrix, and L'Oréal Professional. I am heading back today to capture the last day of the madness. Hope you enjoy the hair inspiration. Some of the things I see these people do with hair is just incredible, and I feel truly lucky to get to be around this industry in this way. Such a fun distraction to be dumped into a pool of hard working creatives doing what they do best, and then asked to shoot their work. They make my job easy. I'm thrilled to say that I will be heading to NYC a few times this year to work on a really exciting project for Redken, with someone I admire immensely. I will leak more details as I can, but I can say it will involve me shooting at Fashion Week for the first time. And that is one more thing I can check off my list of things I have always wanted to do. Pinching myself a little, and would be a jerk not to say thank you for the support and encouragement I get around here to keep at this. Thank you.