E-Session - Melli and Matt

This was the CUTEST e-session! It's brought to us today by the talented Pink Posh Photography...check out their work, I'll be quiet and let the pictures speak for themselves...

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There were SOOO many other GREAT shots from this session. Click here to find them.

Including some amazing ones with sunflowers...you brides out there who are obsessed with sunflowers...think e-session in the middle of a FIELD of sunflowers. Gorgeous.

E-Session – Brooke and Preston

I just LOVE the vibrant colors that make up today's e-session, brough to us by Pink Posh Photography! The couple look so cute, and the comments that Pink Posh wrote on their blog abou this session cracked me up...check it out!

"On the way downtown for Brooke+Preston's esession, Thurst turns to me and say..."I'll hate to be a plant right now." What??!! I had no response, because for a moment I had no idea what he was talking about. But stalkers, you see, Austin was/is in however many consecutive days of 100 degrees weather already...and although this was not a noonday shoot..but rather a 6pm shoot, it was still scorching hot. So, while I thought that Brooke and Preston might want to reschedule the shoot because of the heat (because who's really crazy enough to shoot in this weather outside?), I was definitely not expecting the first thing to come out from Brooke's mouth when she saw me was..."Do I look like I have too much makeup on?" Ummm...stalkers, I now know how guys feel when us girls ask them these loaded questions. So of course I said no. But then I thought, WAIT! What if she was going for that? Perhaps I should say yes? Well, I look to Thurst...who looked away. And then I looked to Preston...who also decided to avoid any eye contact with me. And so, I said..."Do YOU think you have too much makeup on?" So Brooke decided she must have too much makeup on and that we should postpone the shoot and just go eat dinner. Tempting. Food. And more importantly, A/C. But honestly, I thought Brooke looked beautiful. But stalkers, judge for yourself."

What I like most about that last shot is that they're in focus and the rest of the world just goes kind of blurry...like when you're really wrapped up in someone. I know that we've ALL felt that way before!

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And I just love how tender that shot is!

Love all of them, to be honest! Go on over to Pink Posh's blog to see more...these were just MY picks...

E-Session - Dawn and Ryan

I LOVE the shadows that Christina manages to capture in this e-session that she brings to us today. They're great! Here's what Christina of Christina Carroll Photography had to say about this couple:

"Dawn & Ryan are the sweetest couple! I had a great time getting to know them during their engagement session. We went to Georgetown and found some great little spots. I’m looking forward to their wedding in December!"

Check them out!

Are you ready for MY favorite? Here you go...

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Amazing, right? Yep, I think so too! Be sure and click over to Christina's blog found here for more images from this e-session, there are MANY more!

E-Session - Melissa and Hung - 8/6

Today we have an amazing engagement session from Pink Posh Photography. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the "Non-grandma shots" as they call them on their blog! Check it out.

One of the first things that I remember noticing about Pink Posh is the element of seduction that they bring to their work. LOVE it.

And here's some G-rated fun too:

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Be sure to check out their blog here to find more shots from this session!

My Bling...

Yep, it’s time for us to start looking for our wedding bands. I know, it’s still a little far out to be doing that, but in actuality we’re under the 3 month mark, and I just have a horror of picking out what we want, but waiting to order them and then not being able to get them in time...so after we made the decisions on the suits the other day, we stopped off at our local jewelry store where B had gotten my engagement ring.

Now, I know that at a “big box” jewelry store, we might find a better deal, but I guarantee you that you can’t beat the customer service that Patty and the entire staff at Benold’s in North Austin have shown to B and myself. Patty was great when B was picking out my engagement ring, even if I did make it easy on him by falling in love with one particular setting. But she went above and beyond working with him on the diamond and pricing and just really handled everything smoothly. Then when we had to take the ring back to get re-sized, she handled the entire process smoothly. If you’re an Austin bride, you just can’t beat the service at Benold’s.

And here’s a little shopping savvy tip...go to the Benold’s website here and click on the coupon box found in the upper right hand corner. Signing up to receive emails will garner you a 20% off coupon! 20% off from a jewelry store! Score!

So in case you can’t remember (or if I never posted it!) here is what my engagement ring looks like, along with the wedding bands.

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Isn’t it pretty? I LOVE it.

The only difference is that I just want one band for now. Maybe for an anniversary somewhere down the road, another band can be added. Wink, wink – hint, hint...

Are you totally in love with your engagement ring? Or have you gone back and forth over the ring that you’ll plan on wearing the rest of your life?

Rachel and Cory's E-Session

Here is an engagement shoot from our fabulous photographer, Christina Carroll of Christina Carroll Photography. Here is what Christina had to say about this couple’s shoot:

“I had such a fun time with Rachel & Cory. We started out taking pictures in their awesome backyard. They are quite creative and had all kinds of neat things back there. Then we went to Cory’s parents ranch in Goldthwaite, Texas. It was so beautiful! There were old barns, tall grass, old cars, hay, and lots of cows! I even laid in cow poop a few times while I was taking pictures! Oops. We finished up with a great sunset and headed back to take a few more night pictures in their backyard.”

Hope you enjoy!

All of you Texas brides, you KNOW that I HAD to pick that last shot as one of my favorites!

I hope that you enjoyed the "sneak peek!" Head on over to Christina's blog and check out the rest of Rachel and Cory's pictures..click here.

The Night of the Engagement - Part II

(Sorry for the delay…things have been CRAZY with work – I clocked 65 hours last week…)

Continued from prior post…

He let me pick the restaurant, and we ate a good meal with a margarita at Chuy’s in South Austin. We walked back to the truck and when he opened the truck door for me, there was a huge box on my seat. We had talked about this gift earlier in the day, but I had thought that I had won the argument about the early Xmas present. Apparently I didn’t win.

After MUCH grumbling from yours truly, I proceeded to open the present. I tried to get into the truck and sit on the seat while holding the present on my lap. That wouldn’t work for my fiancé, he insisted that I use the seat as a table and stand with my back to him while opening the present. Looking back, with the knowledge of hindsight, I see that he needed my back to him to do what he was doing. So yeah, I open the present and it’s a camera printer that I had seen as Best Buy and wanted. YEA! I go to get into the truck – it was COLD outside! No, not yet. “Open it up and see if anything’s missing.” Because we were right there by Best Buy and could return it if anything was missing. Which prompted me to make the argument of how would I know if anything was missing since I didn’t have one. Yeah, call it the night for me to be difficult. I know. Believe me, I know. Anyway, back to the story.

So I open up the box, and being the true smart ass that I am, I pull out the cds and cables and say “yep, looks like it’s all here to me!” It was really cold and I just wanted to get inside again. My fiancé literally had to encourage me to take the printer out of the box to see how big it was. That’s when I saw the pictures. On the top of the printer, my fiancé had taped some pictures. The top one was a picture of my daughter that said “Will you” and underneath was a picture of his son holding a sign that said “Marry him?” Beneath that picture was a photo of my fiancé kneeling down beside his truck with the ring in the box holding it up to me. Shocked and surprised, I quickly turned around to look at my fiancé and completely looked over him. He was kneeling on the ground, just like in the picture, holding the ring up to me. He asked me in person this time, and I started crying.

And of course I said yes. Tearfully, joyfully and completely touched at the trouble that he had gone through to make the most perfect proposal to me. He apologized to me for not doing anything extravagant, but I was overwhelmed with the thoughtfulness of his proposal. To include our children, without having them actually there was the sweetest thing that he could have done. It was the best proposal that I could have ever imagine or dreamt up on my own. In fact, it was WAY better than anything that I could have dreamt up. It was perfect.

Now, it might not be perfect for everyone. But it was perfect for me. And that’s just one of the many reasons why I love him as much as I do. He takes the time to know me. To understand me. And he still wants to know more. He wants to do more for me each and every day. I’ve got to be the luckiest girl ever…

I’ve got the man of my dreams, and the marriage proposal that melted my heart…what more could a girl ask for? Not a thing. Not one single thing.

The Night of the Engagement - Part I

So from the get-go we knew that the kids wanted to be involved in the asking of the all-important question. They had been bugging us for months about getting married, and they knew that we were talking about it. They knew that we had taken the time to go ring shopping, so they knew that it was going to happen sometime soon.

And they wanted in on the action. Bad. They begged and pleaded to be there when he asked me to marry him. We love our kids. A lot. And we understand that there are times when you have your kids around. The night that you ask a girl to marry you is not one of those time. That doesn’t mean that we don’t love our kids. It just means that we also understand that there are times that you DON’T want your kids around!

But it was important to my fiancé that they be involved somehow. He took that knowledge and made a whole, extravagant proposal night that melted my heart. If he hadn’t already owned it lock, stock and barrel, he would have after what he did to propose to me. Let me tell you the story and see if you agree…

The night that he asked me to marry him started off as a date night. You see, I’ve been working a lot on the new software system that our company is installing at the beginning of the year. And when I say that I’ve been working a lot, I know that you might be thinking of a few late nights and maybe a weekend or two. Not so in this case. I’ve been traveling a minimum of three days a week since last May. I work two days a week in Austin, and three days a week in Dallas. Sometimes I drive, sometimes I fly. No matter what, when I’m in Austin, I have my daughter and when I don’t have my daughter, I’m in Dallas. That’s how our life has been for the past seven months. To keep our sanity and romance alive, we started doing date nights a while back. Nights without the kids, where we go out to eat and maybe see a movie. A night away just for the two of us.

So the first week of December, we only had one night with me being in town and without the kids. It was December 4th. And my fiancé asked me if I wanted to do a date night on that night a few days earlier. Now, I have to say that between the end of September and this time, we had picked out a ring, and I knew that he was trying to tie down the details of how/when/where to buy it at and all, but he had led me on a merry chase of having trouble getting the ring. This is all to tell you that I didn’t really suspect anything on our date night on 12/4.

We had been in training for the new computer system all morning. We got out of training just before lunch and decided to have a date lunch before I had to work that afternoon. We went to this little pizza place on the square in San Marcos that we hadn’t been to in forever and shared a pie with a pitcher of beer. So nice!

After that relaxing lunch we did some Xmas shopping and went home. I had to work and he relaxed a bit. Before long, I was instructed to stay upstairs for a bit while he wrapped a Xmas present for me. When asked why he didn’t just wait until I wasn’t there to wrap it, he told me that it was a present for me to open that night. I argued that we weren’t opening presents early and he told me that this was something that he thought that I would want to open early, something that I could use in the next few weeks before Xmas. When I continued arguing about getting a present that night, he finally told me to suck it up and deal with it. That I was opening the present that night, even if he had to call it a date night present.

Yeah, this was just the beginning of “Sandy being Difficult Night”…stay tuned for more details.

Dreams of wedding plans dance in my head...

From my previous post, you know that my fiancé and I were talking about merging our lives, and making plans for the future together. Yet somehow, we’d managed not to discuss how the event of marriage would take place. Or what we would want our wedding to be like.

The main reason that we had avoided this topic was because we didn’t want to jinx things with our kids. My fiancés son is older, so we knew how he felt about my daughter and I and he was really excited at the thought of us getting married and forming a new family. But he’s 5 years older than my daughter and her moods and opinions are as fast changing as mercury. There were days that she was completely cool with everything, and other days when she would act cooler towards the whole idea.

Then a few months ago, the kids started bugging us pretty hard about when we would get married. And this time, it wasn’t just his son asking, it was my daughter too. Which was VERY cool with us. It relieved a lot of stress and worry from my shoulders, and I’m sure from the shoulders of my fiancé as well. She was really excited about us getting married, and about her having an older brother and they even started asking us if we would have one more kid so that they could have a baby brother/sister. They really got into it and started questioning us about it all the time.

So it was good for me to know that she was ok with things. And once I knew that I had her approval with the plan, it was easy to start thinking about the actual marriage. Not just how we would merge our lives, but when we would take that next step. Which was really neat for me. But still, no discussion regarding weddings.

That all changed at the end of September when we all traveled to Dallas for my friend BH’s wedding. That was the weekend that changed the nature of our discussions. That was the weekend when my future step-son asked why we couldn’t just get married along with our friends since they already had the church and the preacher there! Too funny! To kids, it’s just that easy, right?!?! My fiancé and I were rolling we were laughing so hard.

But sitting through that ceremony, watching my good friend take the vows that I was now free to take, changed something in my head. I sat through that ceremony, looking around at the details and started thinking about what I wanted for my ceremony. And I did the same thing during the reception. I started taking ideas that very night. And my fiancé and I started talking about what we would want at our wedding. We talked all evening about it.

And we talked all the next day about it during our drive home. And the kids got involved. And we all got excited. From that day forward, it’s been nothing but planning our wedding. I mean, we had already worked out all the other logistics during the last few months.

Normally, people have to work out all the details of how to combine their lives AFTER they get engaged. We had been planning this out for months, so the logistics of how to move, when to move, where the extra furniture would go, and how to make the spare bedroom into my daughter’s bedroom where all already planned. Which left things wide open to start planning the wedding…every girl’s dream!

And for me, the wedding took all of my focus. For my fiancé, the engagement took up his time. While I dreamed of wedding dresses, extra special shoes, and fabulous table decorations, he dreamt about the ring and how to pop the question.

The question gets asked…next time!