lavender part 2

fields of purple

can you say delicious?! i love this picture of the STUNNING Anikah.

more to come....

My kind of town.....

Chicago here I come!

My beautiful sister Brittany just had a gorgeous baby girl!!!

And poor little me has to take a vacation all the way to Chicago, snuggle a fresh little baby, and take fabulous pictures of a squishy little one and her sister. What a hard life I have. Haha!!

So, obvioulsy I will be out of the office, but if anyone needs anything, my fantastic Shoot Coordinator Kate is on the ball and can answer any question you may have. She's fab to say the least. And if any of you want me to get a message to Oprah while I'm there, let me know and I'll pass it along. We tight. ;)

Have a great weekend.

I'll high-five Mr. Caray for you. (that link brings severe joy to my heart-"if you were a hot dog....." etc. Ah good times!!)

love, hurricanes, and flying goldfish

So it's official. We conquered the mystical creature I call the Bridal Show. And by conquered, I mean we prepped and planned, drilled and glued and didn't have an aneurysm. I consider this conquering. I consider this a success. All the hours of stress and meetings collided into one beautifully designed booth,

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crisp clean marketing materials (designed by my Nate the Great),

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and one KILLER wall.

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A wall unlike any other. A wall heavier than any other. A wall that would soon end one poor little creature's life.

The day started like any other really. Alarm going off, hair being done, peacocks frolicking in the garden. You know, typical. But what seems to start well, does not always, you know, end well.

Let me back track. When we came up with our ingenious plan for our booth, we didn't account for two very important things. 1) This show was going to be at La Caille, and 2) we are not engineers. When we pictured Bridal Show, we thought of florescent lighting and little curtain rooms. The kind of little rooms that would have some type of bar high off the floor enclosing our little slice of wedding marketing bliss. Lovely polyester, billowing in the breeze. What we sooo did not expect was a beautiful little patio with only a 2 foot tall barrier to protect us. Where, we panicked, is our lovey poly-blend covered bar on which to lean our newly constructed wall? The clock was ticking, bunnies were bouncing and we had to find a way to make do. So, we took a chance, because what else did we have. We leaned our 8'x8' wall tenderly against the glorified cement step, shoved our two lovely antique dressers against the wall in desperate hope that our little sandwich would hold our pictures through the day.

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To our delight, it seemed to be working.

For about an hour.

Suddenly, in the middle of our 90 degree, Utah, July day, came some sort of freakish hurricane strength gust of wind.

Our beautiful wall lurched and screeched. Every bride nearby gasped in horror. I could feel it coming and there was nothing we could do. Nevertheless, I lunged forward over our little dresser clawing at the wall in a vain attempt to stop the inevitable destruction.

I failed.

The wall shot down the hill. Our beautiful fish bowl shattered with a sonic boom, the dresser was launched into my leg and our poor little goldfish rocketed across the sky.

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We all stood in silence. Frozen in our places. Our faces plastered with "no-way-that-just-happened" looks.

All our hard work. All of our beautiful pictures. Our fish?! Un-be-liev-able.

It was totally crazy. Totally devastating. And totally a miracle.

In my attempt to rescue the wall before it's demise, my leg was attacked by the dresser and my finger was sliced (ironically my middle finger),

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but we feel so blessed that no one was seriously hurt, which was a real possibility. That is, no one besides the goldfish whom we have not heard from since.

The other blessing was that the other dresser, which had Cali's beautiful Mac desktop on it didn't even budge. Which made no sense. But nonetheless, it was completely unharmed. Crazy.

The great staff at La Caille, our AWESOME booth neighbors (the coolest family behind Diva Bling Jewelry), and total strangers came to our rescue including one passerby who donated a small first aid kit to me. People are awesome. I'm a big fan.

In the end, there was nothing to be done, but carry on. Although most of the pictures were destroyed, we were able to salvage some of them and still show off some work with the slideshow on the Mac.

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All in all it turned out to be a very successful day, and I don't think our booth was empty for longer than about 5 minutes the whole day.

Most of that was thanks to Cali(of Beautiful You)'s sister Heidi who was a-MA-zing!

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She walked around the show with our cards in bags full of candy talking us up like crazy, and ambushing people for free makeovers done by the uber talented Cali and Catherine.

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(yours truly getting some touchups)

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Heidi even got the DJ to mention us more than 10 times through out the day over the loud speakers. Thank you Heidi!!

She also got people to come and enter in our fabulous drawing for a FREE engagement session and makeup done by Beautiful You. Which leads me to the very exciting part of our post......

We had over 200 entries

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but alas, there can only be one winner, and thanks to Miles that winner is..................

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PEGGY BURCKHARD!!!!!!

Come on down!!!

She and her cute fiance will be getting free engagement pictures and free bridal makeup (fiance's makeup is optional :)

Call or email our shoot coordinator Kate at info@amylittlephotography ASAP and we'll get you all set up.

Congratulations!!!

Thank you everyone who stopped by our booth and made what could have been a devastating day, a totally memorable and FANTASTIC one.

And thank you to Cali and Catherine for being an absolute dream to work with. I love you both!

Most especially thank you to my schnickle fritz husband. What a dream man. You are my best friend. Thank you thank you hun, for doing all the heavy lifting, both physically and emotionally that day, and for encouraging me to step out of my comfort zone. Most of all thank you for believing that I was capable of succeeding. I could do nothing without you.

guess what we're doing this weekend....

in addition to having a panic attack, we'll also be doing this:

July 11, 2009 11 am - 5 pm Map & Directions » Pre-register » La Caille Restaurant 9565 Wasatch Blvd Sandy, Utah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fashion Shows * Entertainment * Hors d'oeuvres The La Caille Bridal Show is Utah's finest wedding showcase, featuring must- have products and services for the distinguishing bride and groom. Meet with the finest Utah wedding vendors to help you plan your wedding. See the spectacular display of cakes, gowns, invitation designers, wedding bands, floral arrangements, photographers, and more. The La Caille Bridal Show is produced by TheBrideandGroom.com and The Bridal Extravaganza. We look forward to seeing you there! Register Now » . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tips for Attending a Bridal Show

(courtesy of www.thebrideandgroom.com/lacaille/) This is our first official Bridal show and we are PUMPED...we are also freaking out, but mostly PUMPED. We are excited to have teamed up with the sassy girls at Beautiful You Makeup. So at the show you can chat it up live with the team from Amy Little Photography and Beautiful You Makeup! We'd love to meet you and we are having some sweet giveaways like a drawing for a free engagement session with makeup artistry from Beautiful You ($350 value). We'll also be drawing numbers for free make up consultations with photos at the show . I'm pretty sure you won't want to miss this. Plus we're awesome. And why wouldn't you want to spend some time with awesome people. :) So come on by and enjoy the sight of me hyperventilating in a brown paper bag. Should be good times for all.

at 18

when i first met jon, he was small. he was maybe 9? years old and as small as a june bug. i remember him with braces and glasses though he may have been older than that when those occurred. either way, in my mind's eye i still picture him that way. not like the strapping young man you see before you. suddenly he is taller than me, more handsome than me and can text my fingers into oblivion.

 how did this happen? i don't remember getting older, when did they? (enter fiddler on the roof serenade). plus his sunglasses are way cooler than mine. basically, he has me beat on all fronts. fetch. 

jon is lynnie's son and if you know lynnie, you have somewhere along the lines had your ear talked off and played several games. you have probably also told her your life story, been severely entertained and walked away with a great friend. she's a riot. she's the life of the party and is not afraid to speak her mind. so when she emailed me and asked if she should come to the photo shoot with her little boy, i politely told her that maybe she should send one of his friends:). i can say this to her because she's lynnie and she's my husband's aunt, and she's hilarious and she knows that she would go through his bag before he left and try to chose his clothes and tell him to fix his hair the whole shoot. she knows this. which is one of the things i love about her.

what she didn't know however, was how much she would love the pictures (her words not mine). how much she would love the clothes he chose. the style, the feel, the sunglasses. and that by allowing him to decide without her, she would always be able to look back and see jonny how he really was.

at 18. 

before he left for college. before he started dressing in suits. 

before he fully became a man. 

so to lynnie. thank you for letting jon come without you-though i know you were dying to be there. thank you for raising such a nice young gentleman. 

and thank you for letting me capture your little boy. 

p.s. frank, you're all right too :). thanks for taking this ding-a-ling to buy a new battery mid shoot. whoops!

p.s.s. ladies if you want his digits, let me know.....

my love

nate the great. today is his birthday. while I love to tease him mercilessly that he is old as dirt, the fact that i'm only 3 years younger than him may mean that I am as old as dirt too. this week was also our 8 year anniversary. Cra-zy! this is a good year.

i consider myself to be one of the lucky ones. to have a husband that is fiercely loyal, who loves me unflinchingly, who cleans and cooks and loves to be with our son. he is kind and patient with me. he is honest and intelligent (though his spelling has room for improvment-who leaves out the letter "e" in "the" so consistently? :) and he absolutely, whole heartedly, believes in me. So to Nate, my best friend, my business coach, my nightly 10:15pm  pep-talker, my photography test subject (you love me right?) my solid ground, and my luvvvv. I am forever, and ever yours. my heart is and will always be entirely in your hands.

happy birthday

p.s. I'm spending the day with my man, so I'll be out of the office until first thing tomorrow morning. thanks for understanding.

it's annoying

it really is annoying that my Shoot Coordinator (and very best friend since 3rd grade-holla!) looks like this. i mean really. how can I compare to this when half way through a shoot I look like a messy racoon on hot asphalt. get serious. the only thing that eases my pain is the box full of unsightly and incriminating photos of her i have gathered over the last two decades (hello, youth conference!). this, however, is not one of those. this one is KILLER. 

lookin good CatWalk. 

* this is just one of the shots from the photoshoot we did for Beautiful You-make up artists extrodinaire. I will do a full post on this cause it's too good to miss.