First comes love, then comes marriage... and a baby carriage?

One of my favorite things about my jobs- both on staff at the newspaper and running Milestone- is getting to see people grow and change throughout their lives. I watch the "secret weapon" freshman softball pitcher grow into a team leader with a full athletic scholarship to UCLA her senior year. I see the chorus girl become the soprano ingenue; I love when I get an assignment about an Eagle Scout or Gold Award project and it turns out to be a "little kid" I photographed at camp five summers ago for a story about homesickness.

Last week I was photographing a grandmother who does triathlons. She was telling me that her grandsons were visiting, that they are her inspiration, and I saw a mop of red hair peeking around the sliding glass door. I know that carrot top from a story we did a few years ago about funding special education! My goodness, that child is TALL now. Love that.

Up until recently when a Q&A on Offbeat Bride completely changed my business for the better and connected me with a calendar full of amazing couples, the majority of my "advertising" was word of mouth. There's no greater compliment than having a client bride confidently send you her best friend, her little sister, her older brother, and in one case, her mom. :) What I love about this is that I get to see the same couples a few months or years after their weddings, still in love, with happy memories and all new goals and dreams.

Angela was Michelle's maid of honor in 2006. Now, almost three years later, Michelle was Angela's matron of honor. And she's preggers! Now only did I get to see some of the same awesome people who were guests at both weddings, I get to see one of my couples three years down the road, as they prepare for Travis' doctoral dissertation defense and impending parenthood.

We also managed to squeeze in a maternity session for Michelle between the bachelorette party and the rehearsal, and then she was kind enough to let me use her as a model during a teaching session with Karla after the rehearsal dinner. So many kickass women, so many photographs, so little time!

And now, the much anticipated preview!







The baby is a girl, by the way. They plan to name her Arianna and call her "Ari" for short.






These next few shots are from the teaching session, which could have been called "all the different ways to shoot a pregnant belly," so there's a bit of repetition here....