A few weeks ago I arranged to do some photos of my brother, Patrick and his two dogs…Katja and Brayden. Patrick has had these dogs since graduating from college a couple of years ago and I just love them. They are a total handful and it cracks me up.

Isn’t this water tower awesome? I had wanted to take photos here for a while when I lived in Morrisville, so I’m glad I finally got the chance.

You can see that Brayden is trying to escape here. Both Brayden and Katja are notorious escape artists. They are actually a really good pair because Katja breaks windows (I believe she’s broken more than 5) and Brayden shimmy’s out of just about any opening he can find. And let me tell you because I have experienced it first-hand, when they escape it is a horror. Katja just sort of wanders around the neighborhood … checking everything out and Brayden (who I’m convinced is part greyhound) runs as fast as he can in circles. This makes him easier to find and harder to catch. I think luckily the escapes have gotten fewer and farther between recently.

Symmetry.

I love Brayden’s silly ears and underbite. I also love that he totally doesn’t care about the camera being all up in his face.

Sweet Katja.

See that window behind Patrick? Yeah…Katja once broke that window. :-)

Here is one last photo that I took of Patrick at an open mic night. He’s a great musician (let’s just say that piano always came much easier to him than it did to me) and he’s done a few open mic nights with his own songs and some arrangements of classics…including an accoustic version of Ludacris’ “What’s your Fantasy.” haha. Anyway, I hope he keeps it up because I think it was great.

So…I wanted to take a moment to talk about my fabulous photographer friend Lauri…of Lauri and Mikey fame. The reason I want to talk about her is that she recently did a photoshoot of Jason and I that is just to die for and I want everyone to see the photos because I think she just made us look awesome!

Here are a few that she told me I could share up on my blog…but you should head over to Lauri’s blog to see all the goodness…including a slideshow with lots more photos. Yaaaaaaay!

(see that….in the above picture Jason and I are sitting on moldy seats and glass in an old abandoned van. I mostly did it so that if I ever want to make an engagement session couple do something they don’t want to, I can always throw out there that I sat on mold and glass for photos of me once. ;-) haha…just kidding of course.)

Thank you so much Lauri for making us look so great! :-)

The day before leaving for Vegas, this engagement album came in the mail and I’ve been meaning to blog about it ever since. This particular engagement album is special not only because the photos are of the awesome couple, Danielle and John, who are getting married in May, but also because it doubles as a guest sign in book! I think this is one of the most exciting ways to incorporate your engagement photos into your wedding day that I have come across. It is something that I will definitely have when I get married. This way your sign in book becomes a really special keepsake that you will want to pull out and look at for years to come.

Of course you could also get this book as a standard album without all the white space, if you’d prefer to not use it as a sign in book. Either way, I just love it.

On a totally unrelated topic…well, other than the fact that they are both books…I wanted to share info about a book that I’ve been reading that I’m absolutely OBSESSED with. It’s one of those books that I want to tell everyone about, so I figure I might as well blog it. Right? The book is called The Brain that Changes Itself and it is written by Norman Doidge, M.D. Now, let me include the disclaimer that I was a psychology major in college and so I generally love anything that gives insight into how the mind works. Kind of nerdy…I know. haha. But if you are at all interested in that sort of thing, I highly recommend picking up this book. It gets into how we learn and how our brains are plastic and always changing and to be honest, it’s really inspirational. So…go get it. (I just felt the urge to write “but don’t take my word for it”…like old school reading rainbow…that’s really nerdy, huh?) :-)