I consider myself artsy, but not necessarily crafty. Although I always excelled in my art classes and even won awards, I distinctly remember a rare low score on a project that I did my freshman year. We had to create an intricate snowflake type design using an x-acto knife on some layers of white poster board. I don’t remember my grade but I can still envision the words my teacher wrote in red pen with her beautiful cursive handwriting, “Poor Craftsmanship”. Fortunately I am surrounded by people that have AMAZING skills in all areas of craftsmanship.

For starters, my mom works for Delta and the employees all dress up on Halloween day. Last year she decided to go to work as the Travelosity gnome. I figured since she had already created one gnome costume it should be easy enough to make one for SJ this year and the results were too cute for words!

Yesterday, in the midst of preparing dinner and caring for a child that had decided to disrupt an ant colony, my phone rang and I answered it, a knee jerk reaction I guess. “Hello, this is Natalie” I said in my professional voice because when I don’t recognize the number it’s usually business related. They said “Hi, this is Staci, are you busy?” I have been in this position before where I can’t really talk, but then I have to ask myself why I answered the phone if I can’t talk, so I replied “Uhhh… kind of, but I have a second.” So she went right into it about her husbands schedule and when we would meet and I thought it was a lady I had just talked about a photo session so I was making plans for a shoot and in the end our conversations didn’t match up and she said “I think you are talking about something else. I am calling about the chickens”. She laughed and I hit myself on the head a few times.

2 weeks ago in my last blog post I briefly mentioned tripling my work load. I had to send my kids off to grandmas so that I could work, have a yard sale, and use a groupon we got for our anniversary. The juggling act has been somewhat of a success, but not without a few meltdowns on my part. It’s only for a season though. When I accepted this work it was because another photographer at the magazine had a family emergency come up and she had to abandon all of her assignments. There is no way I could keep up this pace long term. I just keep thinking “Gazelle Intensity” (you Dave Ramsey people know what I am talking about). So that is where I’ve been.

Hopefully things will start to slow down soon, although with Thanksgiving being next week I know that is probably wishful thinking. None the less EVENTUALLY I will check back in so I can explain why someone was calling me about the chickens. And then I can to tell you a little more about trick or treating and how the last two houses we went to Z went up to the door and when they offered candy he said “No thanks, I have enough already”.

I also have lots of tales from the sales, yard sales that is, both shopping and having.

Then of course I did celebrate 11 years of marriage with J and I have a few photos from the Villas that we went to in Austin.

You’ve been missed little blog, but for now I’ve got to get back to work.

When I took the above photo J said “you can’t sell that bike!”. I guess I’ve been so crazy about making some extra dough on Craig’s list lately that he assumes anything I photograph is going to be up for grabs online. Not in this case. I just wanted to document our latest family activity which is going for bike rides.

We all happen to love it and as long as we take the low traffic back roads there are plenty of places to ride to, such as the barbecue place downtown where you can get a chopped beef sandwich for two bucks or the nearest subway which currently has $5 foot longs.

Then when we are not eating there are TWO different parks nearby, a library, and of course family video. Z isn’t too confident on his big boy bike so he usually rides the tricycle.

Once we get going we travel in a train formation. J is the leader of the pack, SJ rides in the bike trailer behind him.

Z’s bike is being pulled by a bungee cord attached to the trailer, and I follow behind to make sure we don’t loose anybody! Once the little guy gets tired he can easily ride along in the trailer with his sister.

My favorite part of this tradition is the horn. The kids like me to honk this old rusty horn before we start.

If we stop for any reason Z won’t let us get away with starting up again until I honk the horn. I am pretty sure everyone in the neighborhood probably hears that squeaky horn and thinks here comes the crazy bike family. It’s a fair warning. HONK! HONK!

One of my favorite activities to do with the kids is walk to the Family video store that is just a couple blocks from our house. They have a section for free kids movie rentals and we use it A LOT. The walk there gives us some exercise and it’s free family fun. I feel kind of guilty because I never spend any money there, but the employees are always extremely welcoming, and they even clean up the scratched discs for us.This is my way of saying THANK YOU Waxahachie Family Video. You guys are the best!

My mom is in town right now so tonight she took the stroll with us so that we could return some rentals and check out the Incredibles. We’ve seen the Incredibles several times, and Z thinks he is one of the Incredibles and so that is what he is going to be for Halloween this year.

My mom got a Dash costume that I have been working on customizing and she is making a gnome costume for SJ so that she can be the girl from Gnomeo and Juliet.

I am really looking forward to seeing how the costumes turn out and hope to get a lot of use out of them this weekend and Monday!

I like to dance. When I photograph weddings I get jealous of the guests because they always look like they are having so much fun on the dance floor and I have to work. Lucky for me I have had a few chances to get my boogie on here lately. In fact I worry that I may be building a reputation on my face book. If you look at all the latest photos I’ve been tagged in you might be inclined to think I some kind of wild party animal.

Exhibit A: That’s me in the red dress. Tagged on August 25, 2011

Exhibit B: Here I am in a feather boa, showing off various party faces in a photo booth with the fam. Tagged on September 20, 2011

We don’t have cable, but we do have instant netflix and when I saw that we could watch American Pickers online I got all kinds of excited. The show is about these guys that go all over the country, looking for old junk that they can make a buck on.

J and I LOVE this show. It’s on the history channel because all of the antiques that they find have a history of their own, and as they say in the intro, the people they meet are a breed all their own.

That’s one thing I love about the show is that they can just make a random stop on the side of the road and meet the most fascinating people. It reminds me of segment called Everybody Has a Story with CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman. Steve would throw a dart at a map and look up random subjects in the phone book of that town to do a news story on whoever answered the phone. A couple clicks on youtube about some of the stories he did just left me in tears. Like this one or this one.

What I love about these shows is also what I love about my job, I have the opportunity to meet and photograph all kinds of people from around the community and hear a little bit of their stories (or read about them when the magazine comes out).

I already shared a couple stories that were featured in this months issue, and here is one other that really intrigued me.

Don is retired, but makes knifes as a hobby.

I love the facts that uses all sorts of materials, from elk antlers to yard sale scraps, to make his knives out of. He has made 154 knives. If it were me I probably would have lost count, but not this guy, he has each knife documented in little notebooks that he doodles and makes notes on.

Eventually Don started keeping a photo album with pictures of each knife along with notes of their own.

Most of the knives he gives as gifts or donations, although some people insist on paying him, which after seeing these treasures I am sure they are worth every penny and then some.

Don and I didn’t have a ton in common although he could have talked my ear off all day and his wife warned me of that. I really connected with the scribbles and doodles he had in his notepads. They reminded me of the drawings I do when I pack for a trip or the notes that I jot down all day long, but his stuff was more organized and kept together in one place. I am reminded that everyone does have their own unique story, but in some ways we are all part of the same story.

Today I photographed a house that will be featured in the Midlothian Now magazine in the fall of 2012. The featured fall home is shot a year ahead of publication because we want to showcase them when they are fully decorated, but other than Autumn and Christmas houses, we work about two months in advance. Like back in August when I wrote a post called “the photos I’ve been taking” and I mentioned that I had been doing a lot of fun shoots, but couldn’t share them until October. Well, here is a little peek at what I was working on at the time.

I had fun linking up with “what I wore” for my 10 year reunion so I thought I would do it again for the 50th anniversary party that I have been writing about this week.

A couple months ago I found a dress at a thrift store, but I couldn’t try it on. I reluctantly bought and it did fit, even if it meant having to hold my breath to get it zipped up. So now I had this dress, but I had no idea where I was going to wear it.

When I found out my in laws anniversary would be a brown, western, yellow rose of Texas type theme, I thought the dress would be perfect.

The color and style matched what my husband was wearing too.

So now I knew where to wear it and just had to figure out what to wear it with…

First came the orange shoes, which I ended up not wearing because all the ladies were doing pedicures before hand and I wanted to go open toed, but next time I’ll pick these thrift store heels.

I gambled on a used strapless dress that I couldn’t try on and 4 accessories later I think it worked.

I spent a lot of time working on the slide show for Don & LaDon’s 50th anniversary (yes those are their real names). I had tons of material to work with and was hoping to squeeze over 70 years of history into 10 minutes.

The story begins with The wedding photos of their parents. As the song “You’re Just To Good To Be True” plays you see a sequence of black and white photos of J’s parents up until they met and got married at ages 17 and 20. The next song “50 Years From Now” lyrically fits perfectly with this time in their life when they go through raising 4 daughters and the loss of their 6 week old baby boy.

From there we transition into “Love Like Crazy”. I am not a big country fan, but this song has such a good message to it. During this part of the presentation we have the arrival of J and his brother who were born 8 years after their youngest sister. One of my favorite pictures is of LaDon with her daughter with their sons that were born 7 weeks apart.

Then we hear “God Gave Me You” and start to get a closer to current day with pictures of the grandkids and the siblings and spouses raising kids through the years.

My favorite part of the slide show comes when we hear “You’re Just To Good To Be True” again and we are back to the old black and white photos of the family on tractors, but then the song switches to the hip hop version and we see the next generation of kids on tractors in color. The legacy theme continues with past and present photos of the family who played football and lastly instruments.

The video closes with “Love Story” and shows a brief montage of portraits of the happy couple throughout the years. I threw this in because “Love Story” is my mother in laws ring tone and I really wanted to end with a recap of 50 years that focused on the two of them.

So that’s probably too thorough of a description, but I just wanted to share their story and also what my thinking was with the flow of this project. This was one of the longest slide shows I’ve ever put together, but I enjoyed doing it. It was like getting a front row seat to the past 50 years of their marriage and makes me really curious about the next 40 years of mine!