daily

Amanda has been diligently working on this puzzle for eons. With bits of help from Travie and I. Never, ever pick a puzzle of a ship. They're hard.

daily

Bailey was one of my best friend in 3rd grade. And then she moved away, and we were penpals through high school. And then we went to college, and she fell in love. And this is Blaine.

emily

This is going to be a three-part post. Recently I took pictures of two of my good friends, Tina and Emily. They're best friends, so the shoot included some of them together and some of just Tina or just Emily. I'm starting with a post of just pictures of Ms. Emily.

Emily came over to my apartment before the shoot for help with makeup and hair. I had so much fun adding a little control to her fabulous curls and giving her a little natural make up. We talked about her crazy job, school, and what she wants to do when she's done. Emily's just a year younger than me, and I remember a year ago knowing what I loved doing but not being sure how about I was going to make that into a job. God dropped me into the perfect solution, and I can't wait to see what He does in Emily's life!

daily

For my birthday, Jilane and I went to Door County. We took the ferry to Washinton Island, and biked to here, where we rested for a while in a wooden rocking swing. It was a happy day. More pictures to come!

daily

They're best friends. We took pictures.

leslie

Leslie’s like my Number One model. She’s the first person I every did a shoot with and since then I think we’ve done another five shoots. She’s a perfect model for me, she’s fun, she’s a good friend, and she’s gorgeous. We laugh together, and she’s been patient as my skills have grown.

Right now Leslie’s studying abroad in Ireland, but before she left we got together and took some pictures at her house. Some headshots because she’s going to be in an opera at school next year, and some fun stuff. This was the result.

daily

Today included laughter. Laughter with some of the best girls in the whole world. We had a date, and afterwards we took a few pictures in the parking lot. To continue the laughter.

daily

Superbowl weekend I was sitting on Jilane's bed with her and Katie and we were looking at her jewelry for some reason or another. And I said liked this ring. Fast forward to a week ago, Jilane got rid of a bunch of jewelry to a rummage sale, Katie was a part of this rummage sale, she snagged the ring before someone bought it and gave it to me because she remembered I liked it. Aw. It only fits on my pinky but I love it!

siblings

Lauren, the gorgeous girl in the blue dress, is a friend of mine from school. I've posted pictures of her on here before, with her fiance, Jeff. This time though, Lauren came with her sister and brother for some pictures for their mom for Mother's Day. It was so cold that day, but the girls toughed it out in their cute sundresses! It was worth it, I think their mom will love these.

daily

After the Cake War this weekend, we went to the Klondike soccer field. The boys played soccer, and the girls picked dandelions and made wreaths. Jilane put one on CJ. He enjoyed it I think.

ruffled

Today was an incredible, incredible day in blog world. I'm going to post three seperate posts about it, but first off, the most exciting. Because it's so exciting I can't even make myself wait unti last!

ADAM GOT PUBLISHED!! Yesterday I spent the day submitting Jilane and CJ's wedding to different blogs, and today it was published on Ruffled. Which happens to be Jilane's favorite blog.

I was so excited. Jilane and CJ had a beautiful wedding and Adam did an amazing job capturing it, I'm so happy for all of them. :)

P.S. -- click on the image to see the posts!

grey

For Jilane's wedding I get to pick out any pair of grey shoes I want to wear. This prospect is super exciting to me and I've already searched a lot of sites online, though ordering shoes offline makes me a little nervous so I'm going to shop in the store first.

Because her wedding is in March, I want boots. If my feet get cold the rest of me is soon to follow, so I want to be able to keep them as warm as possible. Jilane's wearing boots with her dress too! I also want heels, partly because I'm standing up with girls who are taller than me and partly because heels make me feel pretty!

All three of these options are less than $30! Happy days. Granted, they're probably not the most comfortable pair of shoes out there, but now that I've discovered Dr. Scholl's has the ability to make basically any pair of shoes comfortable, problem is solved.

Mom and I are going shopping this week. We'll see what I can find in stores before I order offline!

thankfulX2

So I'm doing a combination post today. Combining two people I'm thankful for in one story.

Side note -- I'm entering this to ModCloth for a chance to win some free clothes, but that doesn't lessen how thankful I am for these two. I had this post written up and then realized that the offer for ModCloth ends today and thought it was all just too perfect. Anyway, moving on...

I'm officially on day 22 of working out. Straight. Which has got to be some kind of record for me. But I really do enjoy it. Problem is, after 14 days of working out, I weighed the same and my clothes fit the same and I was ANNOYED. And I know it's only 14 days straight, but I'd been working out considerably before that and nothing was changing. I figured it came down to what I was eating. Because of this, I decided to talk to Phil.

Phil is this wealth of knowledge. He loves learning stuff, and he doesn't forget things. He soaks up information about languages and cultures and astronomy and music. He also happens to have soaked up knowledge about fitness stuff. I decided to take advantage of it, and asked him to help me figure out what I can and cannot eat. I had requirements. They had to be things that are easy to make, because typically I don't like spending a lot of time preparing food. And some of the food had to be things I could buy on campus for the days that I eat lunch there, because if I had to pack something I probably wouldn't do it.

So Phil took the time to figure out how many calories someone my size should consume in a day and how many of what kind, and how eating too less is bad just like eating too much is. And took the time to explain it all to me, which could have possibly taken longer than the research did. My favorite part about what he told me...I can eat peanut butter! Apparently it's a slow burning carb, so the occasional spoonful before bed is actually really good for you.

Meanwhile, I'd been talking to my Mom about this too. I knew that I wanted to incorporate fish into my diet, because it's good to eat and good for you. But I have no idea how to prepare fish. So I mentioned it to my mom, the recipe queen, and she went and found me various recipes for different kinds of fish off the internet and printed them out for me, writing little notes with various ideas to mix up the recipes a bit.

This is the best part about that. Back when I moved into my townhouse with the girls, my mom gave me a bag filled with goodies. Things like a bread knife, a flashlight, batteries, tooth brushes...general necessities in life. One of the things in the bag, though, was a binder full of recipes of things she makes that I like. So, when I got my fish recipes, I wanted to put them in the binder, but I realized this when I got back to my townhouse and was disappointed I hadn't remembered to punch holes in them at home, because I don't have a hole puncher at my townhouse.

Then I pulled the recipes out of my backpack to find that my mom had remembered, and punched holes in them, knowing that I'd want to stick them in my binder.

---------------------------------------------------

So thanks God, for blessing me, for now, with a boyfriend who is willing to take the time to learn about something that matters to me, and has ulimate patience teaching me things I don't understand. And thanks again God, for blessing me, for now, with a Mom who is always a few steps ahead of me, even if it drives me nuts sometimes.

shiny

I went shopping today and stopped in to see my pretty Jilaney at Maurices, where she works. I wasn't planning on shopping there, but then she convinced me to try on this blazer. It's all full of sequins. It's nuts. But yet it's this totally versatile piece that can be casual with a pair of ripped up jeans, or all cutesy with a flouncy girly skirt, or a great going out piece with black shorts.

I didn't buy it. I talked myself out of it. There was ONE in my size left. And now all I can do is think about the blazer that I really, really like.

Mom and I are going shopping on Friday. Guess where we're going first? Maurices.

hugs

I really like hugs. And kind of hugs. Friend hugs, family hugs, kid hugs, Philip hugs. Love them. I crave a certain kind of hug though. The kind that are...protective. Or...comforting. It's hard to explain.

Let's put it this way. You know how in a hug there's like the person who's leaning into the hug and then the person who's holding the other person up? Kind of both literally and figuratively. The one who needs the hug and the one who's fulfilling the need. Sometimes you both need a hug, and that's different. But I crave the kind of hug where I'm the one who needs the hug. The ones I get from my mom or stepdad or Phil. When they're holding and comforting me, and my only job is to be held.

Sometimes those hugs come from my girlfriends, but most of the time those hugs are excited, girly, we-love-each-other hugs. And hugs with kids are when I'm usually the one who's fulfilling the need. I don't crave those hugs yet, but I suspect I will when I have children.

Right now I haven't been home for two weeks and in those two weeks I only saw Phil for a few hours. Sometimes school and work overtakes my life. I'm heading home tonight and I get to spend time with Phil this weekend. I'm so excited for the hugs.

sweetest

Last year my friends started this tradition where we get dressed up in hot dresses and go out to eat for Sweetest Day. It's fun. It's all girls, and we dress up for ourselves, despite the fact that most of us have guys we could dress up for. The point is we like to look good for ourselves, and it's fun to erupt into giggles when we notice guys trying not to be obvious about following this great looking group of girls with their eyes when we walk by.

Whenever we do something like this we like to document our hotness with pictures. This time we went a little nuts. With Laura encouraging Janna and Amanda, I took quite a few pictures of all three of them. We got Amanda really laughing, Janna let down her hair to reveal a serious amount of sexiness, and Laura did what she always does, turning on her come hither face in 2.7 seconds.

Whitty got there just in time to change, so she didn't get any individual pictures, and Jilaney met us at the restaurant so she's not in any pictures. Sad face.

I put the pictures on facebook last night, and the reaction to Janna's supreme sexiness was insane. All of her friends commented on how great she looked. That's one of my favorite parts of this photography gift I have, that I can give my friends confidence and help them feel beautiful with it.

hookup

A few weeks ago a bunch of my girlfriends and I had one of those fabulous girl talk nights. Three of my friends are living together in a four bedroom apartment, and they have an extra in their room. And this particular random roommate is driving them nuts. They've been recommending I come over to meet her for a while now, so I finally did. We watched Glee, and afterwards all kind of ran into Janna's room and hopped on the bed for girl talk, minus the roommate. Made me feel kind of bad, but it's a hard situation when they don't trust her to be a part of the intimate girl talk we share.

Once we got in there, laughter exploded. EXPLODED. Janna's a psych major, and is currently taking a class called Human Sexuality. One of the books she has to read for the class is called Sex, Love, and Hookups. And the front of the book is a close up of a girl's back with a guy's hands unhooking her bra.

Well. Really. Throw five college girls in a room with a book like that and expect us to ignore it? I don't think so. We pounced on it and started reading aloud and laughing so hard we couldn't breathe. The book defined specifically what "fooling around" is -- how blow jobs can be considered "fooling around" but when sex is involved then it's considered "hooking up". When I read the words "blow job" out loud the random roommate went, from outside of the room, "OH. MY. GOD. WHAT are you TALKING about?".

Okay, we're all college girls. Such language is occasionally in our vocabulary. Her complete and total shock when anyone mentions anything minutely sexual is one of the reasons her roommates get frustrated with her.

But back to the book. One girl talked about guys hooking up to have more girls on their "tally". Guys apparently go to parties looking for different girls to add to their tally, while girls go to parties looking to hook up with the same guy over and over again so they can pretend they're dating. Like, instead of thinking of it as just going to a party, they think of it as going out with Mark or James or whatever. Drink a little(or a lot), have sex at the party or maybe bring them home first, and then don't plan on seeing each other til the next party, but the girl will feel like the guy loves her, and tell her friends he does.

Um, really? I don't think so. This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts. I feel like if you think hooking up means someone loves you, you should not be hooking up. I know there's love stories out there where people start out just fooling around and then wind up happily married, but really? What are those odds? 1 to 1,000,000? Realistically, you're going to get hurt. And it's going to suck. It makes me sad to think that there's girls who really feel that way.

surprise

We have this thing that we do in my group of friends. During the school year, for anyone's birthday, we arrange a surprise party. Now, the problem with this is we can only do it so many times before the surprise element isn't so surprising anymore.

So when it was Janna's birthday last week we tried everything to keep it a surprise, but still when I was trying to get her to come over to my house for some "epic mac and cheese" and to see my apartment because we've been talking about her seeing it since I moved in months ago, she was questioning why. But I managed to get her to come over with Tina, her roommate, and we ate that mac and cheese.

After dinner she tried on some of my dresses to find one to wear out the next night. One of the dresses was strapless, so she borrowed a strapless bra of mine to try on with the dress, and was pleased to discover it fit her much better than the ones she'd been wearing. Like, very VERY pleased and excited about this discovery because she was fed up with her bras not fitting.

We got back to her apartment and she saw her other roommate Lauren, who'd been having similar bra issues, in the living room, she went, "Lauren! I found a solution to our problem! It's our bra size! I'm not the size I thought, I'm Kodi's size! We should go bra shopping and get measured together!"

And then she walks to her room. And everyone jumps out and yells "SURPRISE!!!!" And she falls to her knees laughing, and totally embarrassed. Officially the best surprise party ever.

walk

I'm ready for the rain to go away and for the pretty fall days to start.

Thursday was a pretty fall day. My friend Alex and I went for a walk on the trails around campus. UWGB really does have a quite beautiful campus. I took a bunch of pictures because a) it's pretty and b) I'm looking to replace my dandelion pictures in my room with fall pictures -- my way of decorating. We had a blast. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Alex is transferring next semester, and I'm going to miss him.

Here's some of the shots.

Phil and I were going to walk in the woods by his house yesterday to get some more shots but to my disappointment, and to Flannel's(Phil's labrador who had lots of pent up energy), it was raining all day. Maybe another day!