I’ve been working on my 2011 calendar and its getting pretty full – and I LOVE it that way! Thought I’d let you guys in the loop as well. Below are my travel dates, how many open sessions I have and other details. Feel free to contact me to book your session for any of these dates. Of course, in between my travel dates I will be at home in Colorado and have openings here as well. :)
March 31 – April 2nd : San Diego, CA – 2 openings
April 3 – April 5 : Los Angeles, CA – 2 openings. I will also be hosting mini boudoir sessions – Contact me for the info!
April 29 – May 2 : Sequoia, CA – No Availability
May 27, 28, 29th : Milwaukee, WI
June 7 – 12: San Diego & Los Angeles, CA – Now booking!
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In other news…
Meet our temporary house guest: Charlie-baby, the golden-doodle! Her real name is just “Baby” but it creates too much confusion around here so I changed it and she seems to respond to it well!
I found Charlie-baby on Friday morning- Claire and I were on our way to music class when I almost ran her over with my car. I of course had to stop. She came running right up and sprawled herself at my feet. She had tags on her, but not like the typical “Hi my name is ___ and here is my parents phone number!”, only her rabies vaccine tag and license number. We took the detour to the humane society to see if they could identify her and call her owners to let them know that she had gone a little romp on her own. Well, the humane society didn’t open for another hour or so and I was not going to be stuck in the car with a dog I didn’t know and a fussy babe (fussy because according to Claire, the car seat is pretty much the devil.)
Anyway, I brought her home and after much research I finally got a hold of her owner…in FLORIDA! To make this long story not be as long as it could, Charlie-baby’s previous owner pretty much relenquished her to me so now I have to try to find her a forever home. Which is fine because she is really a fantastic dog – she’s only about 1.5-2 years old but so sweet and really just wants to be loved. She has taken to all the animals great – loves hunting for Monty (our ferret) and today has decided to stare at Lola (the turtle). She’s just funny and so well mannered (doesn’t get on any of the furniture!) So, if any of you in the area are looking for a sweet golden-doodle give me a holla!
And I leave you with a picture of the flowers on my desk. I love how bold and feminine they are. Fresh flowers are a must, specially during the brittle and brown winter months.
And now for the winner, winner, chicken dinner! Drum roll please… (I used random.org to get a winning number and associated that number to the person that commented the nth time.)
Karen, please email me to schedule your photo shoot!! So excited!!! :)
Thank you to everyone that participated!!! For those of you in CA, I will have dates soon along with some other fun stuff for you guys!
When Claire and Emma were in the NICU, I remember a family telling us that in their culture the child’s first birthday is usually bigger than a wedding. They felt it was immensely important to celebrate that child’s life and I couldn’t agree more. Yet, I find myself terribly conflicted – In less than 2 weeks will be the first anniversary of my giving birth to two of the most beautiful girls: Claire and Emma. Most of you know that we lost Emma 13 weeks later due to a congenital heart defect made even more complicated by Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS). However, I do not want to mourn the loss of Emma on their birthday – I want to celebrate that she was here with us. That she was a little feisty baby who loved to be cuddled but not bathed. Celebrate all the things that she has given me.
So in honor and memory of Emma, I have started “Rays of Sunshine”: A day to appreciate the people that make our days brighter, to cherish the moments that glow in our hearts. A day to love. To laugh. To remember a princess loved forever.
Our heart’s deepest wish is to inspire a simple and memorable time with those you love. To take the time. To make the time to enjoy, adore and relish those who fill our hearts with light, laughter and love and give us a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
We will be having our Ray of Sunshine celebration on February 2nd, by releasing pink balloons and other special moments. Please join us as your “Rays of Sunshine” will give us a peek at what could have been and cherish what is. Where ever your sun is shining with whomever your heart loves, please join us. For you, for them and for Emma.
You don’t have to do anything fancy, a longer and tighter hug will do. Have a garden tea party, bake something sweet, sing at the top of your lungs and do a silly dance, pick fresh flowers and catch slimy frogs, indulge in something pretty, toast with a glass of bubbly. Above all be glad, thankful and cherish the moments that warm your heart.
You can post your photos, comments and thoughts on the Rays of Sunshine Facebook page. We will post our special moments filled with sunshine as well. Many thanks and much love to those who join us. Please feel free to share with others.
On the 21st we head out to celebrate this special time of year with our families in LA and San Diego. That is a mere EIGHT days away. So, I’ve decided to document our remaining days in our home, doing what we do, until we leave. I will try to have the daily post up by 8 or 9pm MST. I really meant to start this a lot sooner, promise, I did! The culmination of this will be the night of the 20th – which will be a special night for the Ashauer clan. :) So stay tuned!
And because no post is complete without a picture, here is one of Miss Claire enjoying buffalo bourguinon.
It was dry. And hot. But we could still feel winter creeping around the corner. We know the dry, crisp air means the turning of leaves, the changing of seasons, into a season of white. We aren’t ready. I suppose we will learn to cope. But this day was about farm living and the bounty harvest of gourds. A first for Claire and I. I was almost embarrassingly excited to find a funny shaped, warped, warty, off-colored pumpkin. My mission for the day. So I could finish decorating our front porch, not that my porch has any decor resembling a haunted Halloween. Just 5 pumpkins we picked up at Whole Foods. (This will be a decorating goal for next year…when Claire understands and can hang dead looking things from the house, put spider webs up for me to walk into, and skulls will be abundant. Or so is the plan.) But for this Halloween, all my hopes were set in these spectacular pumpkins I was going to pick.
We arrived to an enormous parking lot off of a road simply called “County Road 3 1/4”. I don’t know what exactly made it a 1/4 of a road…but that is besides the point. We get out of the car, I start to put Claire in her carrier and she begins to scream bloody murder. I immediately freak out and think I have broken a leg or arm getting her out of car seat. After a thorough inspection, I figured maybe she’s just teething. So I gave her teething tablets and hoped that she would calm down once she saw all the people and such. Nope. It was going to be one of those days. She screamed and screamed until her face was so red and splotchy that it looked liked she had some sort of a disease. The wagon rides, the kids playing, the corn maze, the haunted house…nothing was doing it for her. So we went back to the car. And she was happy to just lay in the back of the car. So we gave her a moment or two, fed her some Winter Squash (with an orange spoon even! How festive of me, right?!), and tried again. With MUCH more success. She LOVED the goats, and looking at the dry corn on the stalks, and watching all the children play. Once we knew she was in a good mood, and I had my temporary fill of playing with the goats, we decided it was time to go pick our pumpkins! But where are all pumpkins?! Um…excuse me, there is a large warty deep orange pumpkin with an askew stalk waiting for me, could you point me in the right direction? I guess I had a very naive perception that I could just walk onto the pumpkin patch and pick my pumpkin. Just that simple. but no. Alas, we figured out that people were waiting in an hour long line to get on a wagon to tour all 2,827,456.928 acres of this place and go pick pumpkins. With the threat of rain and alluring smells of cotton candy and funnel cake, we opted out of that part of the adventure. Instead we found some nice grass behind a building named the “Donkey Dorm” (Don’t ask, I don’t know) and hung out, ate bright pink cotton candy, acted silly and took advantage of the great light to take pictures. Oh, and I had to have a funnel cake too.
All in all, the pumpkin patch resulted in: my Halloween decorations for this year will be the 5 Whole Foods pumpkins, all a little too perfect for my taste; an amplification in desire for a miniature goat; a tummy ache from cotton candy and funnel cake; a mental image of what I think Iowa might look like.
This first collage are mostly all taken by Derek with the standard 18-55mm lens. Why? An experiment. I get a lot of photography questions by mommies with fancy cameras and good intentions, so I am thinking about opening up a “workshop” of sorts to help said mommies learn how to fully capitalize on that expensive birthday present you’ve been asking your hubs for years. Please let me know if you are interested ASAP! If anyone in CA is interested in one of these learning sessions (no spunky name for it yet…) this coming weekend that I am out there, let me know and I will make the time!
The last photos of Claire were taken with a 50mm f1.4. Just a little sharpening and voila! (B&W was a manual conversion from color)
