little and lovely

{lila gwynn. newborn shoot. 6 days old.}

Jon and I obviously love taking photos of people. It's energizing, rewarding, a blast, stressful, crazy, it pushes you on every creative level in your brain, and it's beautiful. Especially when you get photos back to people and they see how beautiful they are. We. love. that.

As much as we love taking photos of other people, there's nothing that makes us more giddy than seeing good photos taken of our own family. And there's nothing more fun than being in the middle of it and seeing just how cute they really are. THIS is why we bought a good camera just less than 2 years ago. This is what motivated us to be better and still does. This is all we ever wanted in the first place. To document our family, and to love what was documented. We actually don't do newborn shoots for our business because it's a lot of work and somewhat contrary to the nature/style of our business with all the detail-oriented posing and studio-like atmosphere it entails, but with our own baby...this was so. much. fun. We couldn't stop telling each other how cute she was over and over. She was a saint for our little homestyle photo shoot, and we totally wanted to eat her up.

This is our baby girl.







































lila + daddy.







behind the scenes...a camera in my hand and a ceiling fan in my head.

home

There's nothing like bringing a little newbie home to stay, especially when there's a cute little boy just dying to hold her, hug her, kiss her and say hi to her over and over and over (if you know Van, you wouldn't expect anything less. The overexcited, super-friendly, in-your-face, Van "hi!!!" is the cutest thing ever, and it's also quite possibly the most overused thing ever. But we love it!).

It's been so much fun to see him be so sweet with Lila. He's never once done anything to hurt her on purpose, and while we know that can't last long (or he wouldn't rightfully be a big brother) we're eating it up while it lasts. We're so excited to see them grow up together!











The holding process. It starts out by Van looking all innocent and reaching out his arms toward the baby while saying "me hold it," quickly followed be the look of triumph for getting to hold her.


Then he'll usually plant a kiss on her head and it's soooo cute. But then he promptly decides he's done about 2 seconds later, and it looks like he hasn't tactfully learned how to express that yet, because he just suddenly drops flat onto his back and starts wriggling out from under her in order to escape.


love this boy.




the crazy sleep smile


life with 2 kids. Looks like we're about to become master multi-taskers by default.




doing what newborns do best...and we're always game for any excuse to get some extra shut-eye.














One of our favorite photos ever. This is Van yelling "i doked!" (meaning = I'm stoked!")

grandma

My mom arrived in VA to help with the baby one day before her due date. That same day, my sister and her 3 girls arrived with my dad after driving 10 hours from NH to spend a couple days with us and supposedly the new baby as well.

One week later, little Lila finally decided to join the party.

But that was 4 days after my dad and sister had already left. And my mom only had 2 days until she would be leaving as well. So when I found out I could be discharged from the hospital 24 hours after the delivery, I jumped at it in order to soak up all the mom time I could get. Lila came Tuesday morning, we came home Wednesday morning, and my mom left Thursday morning.

Van had no complaints, though. He had solid week of one-on-one attention from grandma and he loved every minute of it! We owe my mom big, she cured Van from his fear of the bathtub (the natural result of having no bathtub in the home for his first 19 months of life) and now he's a rockstar bather! My mom has more energy for playing with kids and making them happy than anyone I've ever met. It's amazing to watch her in action!!

I love these photos of my mom with our kids, you can totally tell how much Van loves his grandma! Thanks so much for all you did for us when you were here mom! We miss you already!











I love that my mom and I are making the same face in this photo.