My new children’s portraiture website is FINALLY here! woo-hoo!!!!!!!!!!!! I am so excited. Feel free to peruse it and have a look around. And if you know any parents who are looking to decorate their home with fabulous images of their children, please have them give me a call! We like to surprise our clients with gift certificates and mini-sessions for qualified referrals (hint, hint)!

The site can be found at www.pattycakephoto.com.

Be sure to bookmark it and check back often, as I will be adding to it frequently. I have a session with newborn baby “D” on Friday. I can’t wait!

Thanks for looking!

-shawna K

Karla and David are one of those couples that just exude photogenic. I’ve known Karla for a long time because her cousins Adriana, Aidee, and Maritza have been long-time clients of mine. (I’ve definitely seen Karla in a few bridesmaids dresses!) So it was so exciting and neat to see Karla as the main subject of a photograph. And David most certainly is quite handsome! Aren’t they just adorable?!?! I had so much fun photographing them in Coronado for their e-session, that I think I kept taking pictures long after the sun had set.

They were good troopers, too! They didn’t even complain when I made them lay down in the sand!

Karla and David also wore really fun clothes to their session. I think it was the first time I’ve ever had a couple wear orange . . . and I LOVED it against the crystal blue skies at the beach. I also really liked the clothes that they changed into later. They really seemed to grasp that you don’t need to match exactly in portraits . . . you can see that her dress and his shirt complement each other and it looks fabulous.

This one’s my FAVORITE.

Aren’t they so gorgeous?!?!?!

-shawna K

It’s true, folks. I can hardly be humble about my children anymore because they *are* gorgeous. I can’t deny it. Daddy has some serious work cut out for him when these adolescent years hit. Watch out world!!! Here is the most beautiful Jordyn.

I just read about this on Becker’s Blog and I had to give it a try. It’s an online listmaker and I love it!!!! I make lists for everything: things I need to do for business, things I need to do around the house, gifts I need to buy, books I want to read . .. my lists go on and on. Before I had babies, I was totally a Franklin Covey girl, but with extended days at home with babies, I found that my organizer didn’t get updated as often as necessary, or my lists were too long to transfer each day to the next. But I am always looking for new tools to keep me organized. I think this one is just awesome!

Basically, it’s a web-based list maker, so you can access your list from any computer (or even your phone, if you have web browsing capabilities on your phone). And it’s 100% free! I like free!

So, here’s what I have so far:

To Do Weddings
To Do Portraits
To Do Home
Gifts to Buy
Books to Read
Things I Want

Pretty cool! Thanks, [b]!!!!!!!!! What an awesome tip.

-shawna K

Devyn has become quite the little photographer as of late, but she prefers to only take the picture when you’re making some sort of goofy and ridiculous face (with hand motions, too). She is quite bossy about how she wants you to pose (remind you of anyone? hahaha!). I’m kidding!

Anyways . . . here I am:

My sister and her husband are expecting a baby boy in November and the whole family couldn’t be more excited! Of course, we’ve pretty much decided that she can only make boys and I can only make girls. What’s funny, though, is that my mom was the oldest sister and she only had girls (my sister and me). My aunt was the youngest sister, and she only had boys: which is exactly like my sister and me, since I’m the oldest and she’s the youngest. Too funny!

Anyways, she’s expecting Baby Timothy sometime in the beginning of November.

Here he is from the 4D Ultrasound looking sleepy, sweet, and pouty-lipped! Too cute!

BTW, these pictures were taken by Sergio, the most fabulous ultrasound technician in the world and owner of XDI Ultrasound in San Diego. XDI If you are having a baby, I highly recommend his services! It’s really, truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it’s so, so cool.

shawna K

I know, I know . . . I shouldn’t be eating junk.  I recently bribed my daughter with a Slurpee the other day and so off we went to 7-11. At the checkstand, they had these raspberry colored M&M packages that caught my eye.  Two of my favorite flavors in the world are raspberry and chocolate, and the two combined are divine.  Well, somehow M&M has managed to capture the flavor of a rich chocolate cake with luscious raspberry filling and encapsulate it into a tiny hot pink M&M candy.  You have got to try these things:

I’m so not ready for this . . . but Tyler just crawled.  She was determined to get a piece of Dora paper that Devyn left on the ground.  We’re SO in for it.

Just a little somethin’ I did while my husband was at the Charger game.  The babies weren’t letting me get any REAL work done and they certainly weren’t pleased when I tried to clean the house . . . haha . . . but they sure didn’t mind getting their pics taken today.  Jordyn especially loved sitting in the galvanized bucket!!!

As you probably know if you’re in San Diego, we were hit with bad lightning and thunderstorms last week.  It seems every afternoon, the clouds would accumulate and we’d have these torrential downpours that disappeared as quickly as they arrived. We had just gotten home one day when it was really pouring, and the lightning and thunder were wicked loud.  Remember when you were a kid and you used to count “one one-thousand two one-thousand” etc. to see how many miles away the lightning was?  Well, let’s just say that there was no counting.  It was that close.

One lightning strike seemed to actually hit our house. You could hear the electricity sound, a loud crack, and immediate thunder.  It literally took our breath away.  My husband and I froze. We seriously thought the lightning struck our house!

The electricity went out for a minute. The cable and phones and internet were completely out.  But we had plans that evening, so we decided to work on re-setting the clocks, etc., for when we got back home.  My in-laws were watching the kids and they said the cable came back on shortly after we left. The phones never came back on.

Well, after trying to get things to work properly since then, we discovered that:

- the phone box on the outside of our house had to be replaced by the phone company (we have digital phones through www.cox.com).

- the ethernet card on my husband’s computer fried, but it took us several technical support people and some money paid to HP tech support to determine that. I had no internet access for several days because everything was routed through his computer.

- the control panel for our sprinklers completely fried.

- one of our printers completely fried.

- even though cox fixed out phone lines, we later discovered that one of our phones is ruined: it works for one call, but it won’t hang up unless you unplig it from the jack completely.

- oddly, my alarm clock is stuck on one wake-up time and cannot be changed.  everything about the clock works perfectly, except I can’t change the wake time!  Weird!

This whole experience has been so strange.  We kept finding all of these weird electronic and phone problems, so we were convinced that lightning had struck our house.  Even our neighbors commented on how they thought lightning had struck our house.  Well . . . we think the broken roof tiles and stucco scattered all over our backyard prove it.  It appears as if the lightning hit the highest peak on our house in the backyard — we are on a hill overlooking a valley. Excellent for the views, apparently not so excellent for avoiding lightning.