my new photography business...

I've decided to jump in and start a business doing the one thing i LOVE...taking pictures! I plan to specialize in childrens portraiture and also birth photography. I shoot with natural light so I only have a couple months left of outdoor shooting but I want to do birth photography all year round. If you have a Facebook (does anyone not? haha) please "like" my photography fan page by clicking here or looking me up under Tracy Olson Photography. I really appreciate it! I'm looking forward to photographing and capturing those little moments in others lives :)

iheartfaces: pets

The theme this week at iheartfaces.com is pets, so i decided to enter our dog, Dolly. She has been part of our family for a year now. We decided last summer that we wanted to get an older, bigger dog for the kids to play with and so she would be potty trained. She was a rescue, found in a field wandering around.

As we walked down the aisles of dogs at the shelter, we came across her...a two year old retriever mix. She was pretty much the one we had our eye on so we had the worker take her out of the cage and we went in a room to get to know her and see how she was with all the kids. The volunteers had been working with her on sitting and walking on a leash. We decided to take a chance on her and bring her home.

I remember the drive home with her...she sat on nick's lap (lol) and when he rolled the window down she stuck her head out of it and was trying to bite at the wind. we were laughing so hard. i also remember her shedding like crazy in the car and the hair blowing around everywhere...and i had thought having a dog with shorter hair meant less hair around...WRONG!

She has come a long way since we firtst brought her home. She used to freak out when the tv would be on...barking at it and her face right up against it. She would FREAK if a fan was on...running around and barking at it. Those things she no longer does, thankfully but she still will chew things up here and there.

Dolly is such a sweet dog though who LOVES to soak up as much attention as she can :)

hes 4...

mr. daxton turned 4 on sunday. how thats possible i dont know. i was just looking through old pictures tonight and came across some from when he was a baby and i was thinking...where did the time go?!
he had a great birthday...LOVED his gifts...we got him quite a few pirate things since hes soooooooo into pirates right now. his favorite thing was a pirate dress up costume and pirate ship. when i had initially asked him what he wanted for his bday he said...lipstick and pirate costume. lol. what a combo! we got him some chapstick aka lipstick and he was SUPER happy about that. was funny to watch him open it because he said "oooooo" and got a huge grin on his face. yep, its the little things in life that matter :)
After blowing out candles (which he did while we were singing to him), eating his clown cupcake and opening presents we were off to the fair! it was a beautiful day to go. the kids each got a wristband as did nick and rode ride for 4 hours! well worth the money and they had alot of different kiddie rides. daxton was upset when he wasn't big enough to go on the huge boat so he settled (after many tears!) on the little one.
We brought home 2 goldfish that X and X both won. funny that we didnt remember them until tonight...a whole 24 hours after we got them and they had been in the bag out in the car the whole time! we thought for sure they would be dead, but nope. crazy goldfish!
So thankful to have had this wild boy in our lives for the past 4 years, even if it probably has shortened my life span some ;) life just wouldnt be the same without him keeping us on our toes thats for sure!!

i heart faces: eyes

The theme this week at iheartfaces.com is eyes. I love eyes...they are afterall the windows to our souls right? My children have mostly different eye colors. Xavier has a chocolate brown, Xandria has a bright blue, Ziana has a dark blue and Daxton and Drake both have hazel eyes. I love all the different shades of their eyes. The photo I chose this week is of Drake and his eyes, or rather eye. I was taking pictures of him being silly and making different faces when he decided to start winking. He didn't think I could snap the camera fast enough to get a shot before he switched eyes, but I did! I love the picture I was able to capture...not only does it show his silly personality but also how gorgeous his eyes are!

i heart faces: props

This weeks challenge over at iheartfaces.com is all about props. I chose this picture of Ziana and her cowboy woody. He has been her favorite doll for over a year now! She has just about every woody doll that has been on the market since, haha. On this day we were at my parents house before heading to big brother's baseball game when she decided to take woody on the swing. She had so much fun pushing him back and forth on the swing...and I had fun taking pictures of her doing it :)

i heart faces: let's hear it for the boys!

The theme this week over at iheartfaces.com is: Let's hear it for the boys! which means you can enter any photo you want as long as it has a boy in it. In honor of it Father's Day being yesterday, I'm entering this picture of my husband Nick w my baby girl Ziana. I love how happy she is to be getting smooches from her daddy...and he adores her just as much as she adores him <3

um...yea...so...

i just have to say that i can NOT believe it's been since october that i said i was getting back to blogging!!! lol. ok, so this time i'm definitely going to work hard on changing that!! i post alot of what's going on on facebook but obviously not our day to day stories and such. so that's what i plan (once again!) to resume here :)