I was so excited when Bev Hollis contacted me about taking some lifestyle photographs of her with her dogs, Lily and Niles!  I eagerly accepted and then realized I had just agreed to photograph an amazing pet photographer with her dogs.  The pressure slooooowly started to sink in.  Oh boy!

Bev lives down the road from me here in Leesburg, VA and we have been friends for a while but this was the first time that I got to meet her sweet doggies Lily and Niles, and they couldn’t have been more wonderful!  They had me laughing the entire time – Lily was full of sweet kisses and Niles kept striking poses like a professional model, I suppose that is what happens when your mom is a professional photographer!  Mother Nature blessed us with the most perfect, west coast-esque, non-humid weather – we were ecstatic!  We had a fun time strolling around old town Leesburg, which was filled with so many colors, textures and the most beautiful light!  We chatted about life, photography and how much we love our dogs.  By the end I wanted to bring Lily, Niles AND Bev home with me!

I am still working on editing Bev’s photos but I wanted to share a few early favorites!  More to come soon!

Thanks again Bev – you guys rocked it!

A friend of mine highly recommended a psychic that she spoke with and the day before Snowmageddon slammed the east coast, I decided on a whim to see what the psychic had to say.  It was actually a lot of fun and I was surprised when she told me that she saw a lot of travel in store for me this year, because I hadn’t really been planning any trips (other than dreaming about going to Hawaii)!

As the year began to unravel, many trips eventually started to unfold – between several family weddings, a multi-location commercial shoot for an exciting new adventure company as well as a vacation that the hubby and I have been wanting to take for a while – it all seems to add up to quite a bit of travel.  I guess the psychic was right after all!  The really exciting thing that has me jumping up and down like it’s Christmas morning is that these are all basically my favorite places to travel to in the US (ummm, with the exception of Oklahoma).

The cities that I will be traveling to this year include:

New York City – Fall 2010

Las Vegas – Summer 2010

Northern California – Carmel, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Auburn, Placer County, San Jose – Summer 2010

North Western Washington – Seattle to the San Juan Islands -  Summer 2010

Oklahoma City – Fall 2010

Honolulu, Oahu – Winter 2010/2011

Wailea, Maui – Winter 2010/2011

If you live near any of these areas and are interested in a pet photography session by Sara Riddle, please send me an e-mail and I will add you to the list!

I was all prepared to write up a blog post to tell you that I was going to start implementing Tater Tot Tuesday and Makena Monday – when my husband walked in my office, saw the title ‘Tater Tot Tuesday’ and jokingly said it sounds like a school cafeteria lunch menu.  Oh good lord!  Apparently my new idea might need some rethinking and fine tuning.

Anyways, I was about to say that Tater Tot’s hierarchy of favorite things in the whole entire world goes a little like this…

#1  mom (I’ve started calling Tot my shadow)

#2  dad

#3  food

#4  toys

#5  laundry day (she has anointed herself the official special helper of laundry day)

#6  going on walks

Now, lets say that Tot is next to me and her dad walks through the door.  For the next 5 minutes, I drop to #2 and Matt moves up to #1.  If Tot gets a new toy, it moves up to #1 on her list for about a week – especially if it has a super durable squeaker.  If it is laundry day, that instantly moves to #1 because she considers socks to be new toys.  Every meal time, food ranks #1 and always instantly trumps everything else until she is fully satisfied that she has gotten every single crumb off of the carpet (that’s how she got the nickname Mini Hoover).  My point in all of this is that the hierarchy of what is important to her is constantly changing depending on circumstance, and it brings me so much joy to see her so enthralled with whatever is currently #1 in her hierarchy.

Our last laundry day certainly ranked #1 on her list because as always, she got to be my special helper and deemed herself the official Guardian of the Socks.  Which is so ironic because she wants to protect them and destroy them at the same time.  It sometimes makes me wonder if she’s been secretly reading Twilight.

My point of all of this is to share a photo of little Tot in her prime enjoying her current favorite thing of the day, laying on a huge pile of clean clothes, watching me dangle a sock above my camera that she desperately wants to lunge for…