How quickly you are changing from a toddler to a little girl. I have loved this past year with you. One year olds are so much fun. You have grown so much, but you are still “baby” enough to easily sit on my hip or climb into my lap and, while you talk in sentences all the time and use correct pronouns, you still mess up the “me” when you say, “Mama hold you.” I’ve never corrected you because it’s so cute and makes you still seem little.
With your birthday and Christmas being so close, you have been heaped upon with gifts and, while you do enjoy the presents, you will happily rip off the paper only to continue…playing with the paper. You like to rip each little piece into smaller pieces until there’s just a pile of tiny little wrapping paper pieces all over the floor. You are still obsessed with coloring (“do some art,” you’ll say) and some of your favorite gifts have been markers, coloring books, and Play-Doh. (I also recently let you play with kinetic sand because I had the time to sit down with you and make sure it didn’t get all over the floor and we played with that sand for 45 minutes straight!)
You also got a scooter for Christmas and, thankfully, we had some really beautiful days where you could already put it to use. You have learned the basics quickly on it, but steering is your biggest challenge. You continuously say, “I need help!” but then yell “I do it myself!” when we try to help you.
You love your brother and it has been a joy to watch you two together. Especially and mostly when you’re not fighting. Just last week, you guys made up a game that Henry named “slam dunk” where you would throw his puppy back and forth to each other and laugh and laugh. It made no sense to me, but I also joined in laughing because you guys were so being so cute together. You want to do everything Henry does, including go to school. Some days you even insist on taking your little backpack along to preschool drop off just because you’ll look just like the big kids. You’ve pitched more than one fit about not being able to stay with him at school and you get really excited when it’s time to go pick him up again. Next fall when he starts kindergarten, you’re going to have a tough adjustment having him gone all day every day.
After their engagement session on Friday in the rain forest and on the beach and their wedding on Sunday at Casa de España, we capped off our trip to Puerto Rico on Monday with a newlywed session at Castillo San Cristobal and in the streets of Old San Juan. Overall, from a photography perspective, it was so fun to be able to truly capture so many views of Puerto Rico in one trip. We got the rain forest, the beach, a fortress, the colorful Old San Juan streets, and, of course, the wedding venue right there in the midst of town.
While Casa de España is walking distance to Castillo San Cristobal and is right there in Old San Juan, the timeline of the wedding day didn’t allow us even 10 minutes to go off-site so this session, the next day, was a perfect choice! It was relaxed and fun with zero clock-pressure. And, as an added bonus, Nicole got to take portraits in her reception gown! (If you look at their wedding photos, she was wearing a Morilee gown, but changed for dancing later than night into this gown.)
You’re an entire hand-years-old now. I remember being five. I remember being able to use my whole hand to indicate my age. And now I have a child who can also do that. The old saying “time flies” could never be more true than when you apply it to your children. In a blink, you went from a wrinkle, red-faced infant to a toddling little baby to a full-on little boy. You’re curious, smart, inquisitive, and funny. (You also throw tantrums and have a hard time sharing with your sister, but I think that is true of most kids. It’s a constant work in progress over here.)
You love all things farming. Last year around Christmas, you got a toy farm catalog and it became your favorite book. You took it in the car, you read it in bed, you carried it with you everywhere. Being that it was just supposed to be a Christmas catalog, it quickly started falling apart from constant reading. But you still carried around all the pages and you knew exactly where various brands of tractors and combines and grain carts and wagons were within the torn book. You have a plethora of farm toys already in the house, from 1/64 size to 1/32 size to LEGO versions of farm machinery, but you are constantly wishing for more.
Last week, while we were in Puerto Rico, you got to stay at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. Because of the timing of planting in the spring, harvesting fell right over the time we were gone, which meant you got to be out in the fields long after the sun had set (even eating dinner in the combine which you thought was especially fun). When asked what you want to be when you grow up, you immediately respond, “A farmer!” You know more about farming than I do (which probably isn’t that incredible, I guess, but I do have my own share of knowledge having grown up on a farm), in part because you love to watch farming shows on YouTube. Who knew there was a whole following for YouTube-famous farmers with GoPros?
And though farm machinery is for sure your bread and butter, you also have vast knowledge of trains and construction trucks and, as a result, I can easily tell the difference between a back hoe and an excavator, a front end loader and a bulldozer. When we drove out to Ohio this past summer to visit cousins, your grandma laughed when I’d be driving along and randomly say something like, “Henry, look over there! There’s a skid steer loader and a John Deere tractor!” My brain has long been trained by now to notice anything with wheels and tracks.
You love to read and have surprised us all with your ability to read. I don’t know how it happened—we never taught you so we claim no credit—except that we’ve been reading books since you were a baby. But somewhere along the way, you learned how to sound out words and we have long graduated from early-readers to chapter books. We are currently on our third Laura Ingalls Wilder book (we still read that to you; it’s wordy with no pictures) and you often read to yourself or us from Frances books, Curious George, Frog & Toad, your Bible, and any picture book in your collection (or from the library). I remember a time last winter when I thought you had just memorized the books you were so easily reading so I went to the library, got a bunch of books we had never seen before, and gave them to you as a sort of test. As it turned out, you just started reading them out loud, thus disproving my theory entirely.
You are in your second year of preschool; next fall you’ll start Kindergarten. You love your teachers and it is a joy to see you loving to learn. You are introverted by nature; you refuel by being in your comfort-spaces either by yourself or with just our family. But we are working on getting you more comfortable making friends and staying engaged, even if they aren’t interested in the same things you are. This fall has been a tough one though with your best friend since birth (technically, I think you were four months old when you met) moving across the country in the late summer. We both lost our best friends on the same day and I don’t think I’ll ever forget how your body shook against me and our tears mixed on our cheeks as we left the park after saying our final goodbye. It was sad and we all felt a little lost for a long time. I wanted to shield you from that feeling of loss, but…how? In the end, better to feel it and mourn it than to stuff it away without ever processing. You are the kind of kid who would rather have one close friend than fifteen semi-close friends. Having school start back up shortly after they moved was a godsend because it, by nature, surrounded you with lots of other kids your age to play with and gave you plenty of things to think about and learn and do, filling the obvious void of summertime play dates with your best friend. The absence of him in your daily life has forced you to form new friendships though and, as a parent, while it’s hard to watch your pain, it also fills me with pride to see you working to form other friendships.
Your built-in friend is also your constant antagonizer: your little sister. We never know if you guys are going to burst into fits of giggles over an inside joke you have or if you’re going to be fighting because you both want the same color of cup. I know sibling relationships can be hard and Lord knows they are filled with lots of ups and downs, especially in childhood, but the moments of peace and laughter and caring are such a joy to witness. I pray that you two will always be close; that, even as adults, you’ll treasure the shared sibling secrets you have, the built-in friendship that you gain simply by being in the same family.
I hope you have the best birthday, my little Henry Pie. Not a day goes by, even in the fiercest of parenting storms, that I am not incredibly grateful for you. You made me a mama and you flipped our world upside down with a love we didn’t even know existed. It continues to be an honor and joy to watch you grow, even while you’re going about it too quickly. The world is a lucky place to have you in it.
We flew into Puerto Rico on Thursday and got up bright and early Friday morning to head to El Yunque, the national rain forest that takes up a large chunk of land on the eastern side of Puerto Rico. It served a dual purpose since we wanted to hike there and we were also going to be doing part of Nicole & Braylen’s engagement session there in the afternoon. A few trails (and one waterfall that I was particularly hopeful to see) were closed off from lingering hurricane damage, but most of the park was open and accessible so we started the day with a hike up to Mt. Britton Tower and then hit as many other smaller trails as we could. All throughout the day, I was scouting for locations to take pictures later on. We got hit several times with outbursts of rain–being in a rain forest after all–sometimes torrential, sometimes misting, but thankfully, it all cleared out by late afternoon when we were taking these pictures.
We ended up with 3 different spots that I wanted to use: a true trail in the rain forest, an old lodge building that Kevin stumbled upon after venturing further than I did on a muddy trail, and a bridge over what used to be–many years ago–a swimming pool in the forest! Logistically, my biggest issue was (ironically) the same thing I deal with here in Iowa: the early sunset. Because we had just flipped back from daylight saving time the weekend before, sunset was happening at 5:45ish and as soon as it sets, it gets dark quickly. So we started the session in the rainforest (where we’d need the most light) and then ended it at the beach (where we’d have open access to the sun and the sand acting as a natural reflector). And all in all, despite the fact that we had to play it by ear just a bit, it ended up being absolutely perfect and so so beautiful!
As a little sidebar: I have couples ask me all the time when they should do their engagement session and I always say that there are zero rules about that! This is a perfect example. They wedding was on Sunday and we did their engagement session on Friday afternoon. The only time that you absolutely must do your engagement session 6+ months in advance is if you want to use photos for your save the date cards. Otherwise, it’s all fair game! The best way to think about your engagement session is that it’s a practice run for you. I get to see how you two interact with each other (the goal, of course, being that I’ll be able to capture you most naturally); you get to feel how I direct you in and out of poses and all of that works together to make for a smoother wedding day when you have already practiced and are old pros at it!
Just a week ago, we were enjoying the warm sunshine in Puerto Rico as we were celebrating Nicole & Braylen’s Casa de España wedding in San Juan. We were thrilled to be back in Puerto Rico (my sister got married at Castillo San Cristóbal 10 years ago!) and we loved getting to meet Nicky & Braylen’s friends and family. Their wedding day was filled with so much joy and celebration (the dance floor never emptied) and it was so sweet to witness their vows. We packed our trip with photos (the wedding, obviously, but also an engagement session on Friday and a day after session on Monday; those will be on the blog later this week!), but we also had some time to hike in El Yunque, swim in the ocean, and walk through the Spanish fortresses and Old San Juan. It was a busy trip, but busy with so many good things.
Nicole & Braylen live in North Carolina, but Nicole is from Puerto Rico and many of her family still lives there so it was sort of a hometown wedding and sort of a destination wedding. They had looked at several venues in San Juan, but everything about Casa de España fit their wishes and it was such a beautiful venue to photograph in! Casa de España was built in 1934 as the headquarters of a private social organization made up mostly of Spanish citizens who lived in Puerto Rico at the time. This is clearly reflected in the stunning Spanish Moorish architecture. (Those pillars! Those tiles! That courtyard! Those towers! That ceiling!) Two interesting facts that I found out: 1) the fountain outside is a copy of the “Patio de los Leones” at La Alhambra in Granada, Spain! and 2) the courtyard where the ceremony was held was used to film two coronation scenes for the Disney movie “Princess Protection Program,” which I’ve never seen, but now I sort of want to. So all that to say, this building has history and it was really fun to photograph in such a unique and beautiful place!
We started the day at the Caribe Hilton, where everyone was getting ready. It’s a beautiful resort that was just a short drive from Casa de España and we got to look out over the ocean as everyone got ready.
When they first began talking, she was going to grad school in Lincoln, Nebraska and he was working in Columbus, Nebraska. “I remember him saying he was from Iowa and I couldn’t believe our home towns in Iowa were an hour apart!” Sara was really busy in grad school so they continued talking, but didn’t go on their first date for another two months. They ate at Applebee’s–both say it was the best restaurant option Columbus had–and then went back to his place to watch a movie because “my home theater system was better than the Columbus Theater,” Josh said. They discovered early on that they both love watching movies and still, five years later, say they do a lot of dinner-and-a-movie dates.
Since their first date, they have moved back to Iowa and call Pella home. I loved getting to hang out with them in downtown Pella before we traveled a few miles out to Lake Red Rock, a place I had honestly never heard of before, but have since found out that it’s actually Iowa’s largest lake!
Josh had a rough outline planned to propose to Sara, but Iowa was hit with the polar vortex last winter (you guys, do you remember how brutally cold that was?!) so he had to move things along a little quicker than he had planned. Sara said, “So we had planned an evening in January (used it as an excuse to celebrate our dating anniversary) to go see Harry Potter in concert in Des Moines. There weren’t any events really going on around our anniversary so we decided to go that weekend instead.
“I kind of had my suspicions but I didn’t want to get my hopes up and have nothing happen. After the concert, he asked if I wanted to walk around the courtyard next to the event center. He knows I like Christmas lights and they still had the lights up in that courtyard. Not thinking anything of it I agreed. After I gracefully fell into a snow bank (I’m a klutz), we walked around talking about how we couldn’t believe it had already been 4 years. I remember him saying, ‘You know I love you, right? And because I love you, I am finally doing this.’ He got down on one knee and, after that, it was all a blur as I have never been so happy in my life!”
