so, i'm not much of a sappy person...okay, maybe i am, but not publicly. but today was a special for ryan (or so i hope it was). we (and by we, i mean me...lucy just ate icing all morning) made ryan breakfast in bed, went to church, and we went to lunch at carino's, and they didn't royally screw up his order. although, i wish it would have been like that one time we went to carino's in lexington, and our waiter was dressed as A.C. Slater (for halloween), in his wrestling unitard thing and curly mullet wig. but nobody knew who he was supposed to be, except for us, and we died laughing...that would have been a great father's day...

anyway, lucy and olive are so lucky to have such a wonderful daddy. i don't tell him enough...but he's pretty great. i think the best thing here lately is when ryan puts lucy to bed at night in her big girl bed. he tells her a story about a little girl named lucy and what all she did that day, and how she gets in her big girl bed every night and goes to sleep. she gets so excited and is so into it, and then goes on to sleep...usually. it's great. i wish i could have that effect on her...but i don't. all day i've been telling her to say "happy father's day," and i don't think she realizes what that's about, since she doesn't even say the word "father." whatever. she did good though.

we tried to take a few pictures this afternoon...almost complete disaster. lucy just absolutely hates having her picture taken, and will just run from the camera if she sees it. ryan and olive behaved perfectly...and lucy just ran around like a crazy person. so here's a few of what i got. you can kind of get the feel of how things went by the first picture...yeah. to see more, click here.

for father's day, i decided to keep it classy. i made ryan a cake, as you can see. a very small cake because he's not much of a cake person. but i am, and have a current obsession with cakes...so that's what he got. lucy and olive also made him a picture of a flower made from their hand and foot prints...they are so creative...i wonder where they get it. but, overall, i think the apple cake won.

this afternoon i had the chance to photograph one of my best friend's kiddos, ainsley and austin. my friend jennifer is visiting from houston and had a few minutes to swing by and let me torture her children. poor austin was not really into having his picture made, but he pulled through and they turned out so cute. here are some of my favorites! to see more, click here.

this weekend my parents had a party for my sister. she just graduated as a doctor of audiology, from uams. she will be moving (i'm sad) to shreveport, la in july to start her new career. so, we had a graduation/farewell party with our friends from cabot, and i decided i wanted to make the cake. so yeah, i was tempted just to make another ladybug cake...but i thought that might not be appropriate. so i was brave and decided to go with a two-tiered cake. and for my first "big girl" cake...it thought it turned out pretty good! i still have a A LOT to learn but i really enjoyed making it and am kind of hoping for another reason to make another cake soon... so, if you need a cake...give me a call!

we took the girls swimming at my parents house over the weekend. lucy has literally only been in the pool two times this year...and is already swimming! can you believe it? we are shocked. i took her out one day with her floaties on and let go and she barely noticed. she did freak out a bit when she did notice. but since then, she's like a fish. she always yells out "i nemo, i nemo." and ryan is nemo's daddy. hilarious. she is doing amazing, already moving her arms and kicking her legs. of course, olive is not doing as well...she's pretty lazy. she just hangs out and watches everyone, looks hot in her swimsuit, gets her tan on...and enjoys her bottle. check out the flickr set.

okay, so i don't think it's a shock to anyone that we are the biggest procrastinators in the world. we just have to finally decide "we are going to do this right now" and not stop until we do. like taking pictures of olive...yeah, we'll do it later. whatever. with that said, we finally hung up our pictures in our house!!! this is not just a couple month procrastination...it's been since we moved from paducah in november 2007...yeah. in our old house, we just hung pictures up on the nails that were already in the walls...which our landlord thought was a great feature. "I just thought i'd leave all the random nails so you guys could use them"...really...no...annoying and crappy.

since we were having people over for the cookout, and since we'd had these frames sitting around the house for months now...no one really wanting to make the decisions as to what photos go where...we finally did it! that is lucy's favorite phrase from Dora, which is supposed to be "we did it" but she says "i did it." after a long emotional process, we finally decided on this layout and got them up. now we no longer have big blank white walls. they look great and make such a big difference in the room. we need a little lamp in this corner because it does get a little dark...but we may have to just talk about it for a year until we go back to ikea and then settle on yet another hanging lamp...i'll keep you updated.

i had a chance to photograph some of my favorite people this weekend down at the river, rob, stephanie, michael, jack, lily, and averi. there are more to come, but this was one of my favorites so far. all four kiddos were great!