I changed the blog layout as it’s now Spring. It doesn’t feel like it yet, though. It’s not even 50° F at 9:30 a.m. I hope that the weather is nice for my youngest daughter’s birthday on Wednesday. She will be 21. I cannot believe it. She’s not a drinker and says that she will be ordering a drink, but won’t drink it. I don’t know if I believe her or not! I did tell her to call if she does drink more than one drink, as she’s never drank at all and is slender, she will be pretty buzzed!

Today we’re going to the movies with the littlest member of our family. We’re taking her to see “How to Train Your Dragon”. Even hubby is going, which is a BIG deal. He and I go see movies together, we don’t really see little kiddo movies in the theater any longer. I’m glad he’s going, he loves her to pieces, which is why I think he is going.

The fireplace in the family room is nearly completed. We just have to tile the surround and the upper molding space. I hope to do that this Spring sometime. We took the mirror down a few weekends ago and have been painting it since then. Hubby just finished the trim painting yesterday and it looks great.

I’ve been booking appointments for senior photos and starting next week I pretty much work every Saturday for the next 3 months! Which is great.

I cannot believe that Christmas is only a few days away! I have everything wrapped, for the most part. I just need to get one little thing wrapped and make cards for my hubby and kiddos.

The grand-daughter is getting a kitchen for Christmas! This is destined to be a hit as she loves helping in the kitchen. I still remember when we gave her mom her first kitchen, oh wow, I’m so old! Anyhow, that’s her big gift this year, I’m sure there will be photos after Christmas of her using it and making some great food!

I’m so looking forward to the New Year, 2010. Wow, that sounds so cool! There’s a bunch of things on my goal list for next year, both personally and professionally. So, we’ll see what happens. Hopefully I will be sitting here next year typing out the things that I’ve accomplished and the next year’s list.

Personal List

1. Lose that last 15 pounds. This is something that I’ve slacked off on big time. Now that I will have more time for ME I hope to accomplish this before the Spring.
2. Start a Roth IRA. Hubby and I just visited with our financial planner last month. We have enough left over to start our IRA’s in 2010 and keep them going for years. He did an analysis of our finances and we’re not exactly on target, but we’re pretty close. Even though we’re getting a late start, we’re still going to be okay.
3. I want to get some sort of furniture in our living room. Right now everything to be hung on the wall is leaning against the walls and we have a piano in there. That’s it. It will be two years since we moved in next month and while we have the room painted, I want it darker. We had it painted in August and it’s a very pale green. Over the past few months I’ve decided that I want forest green or at least something darker than baby green in there. So, we’re either going to repaint it ourselves or hire a company to do it. I hesitate at re-hiring the company that did it in the first place. The guy is a great person, but he’s very conservative with color and we really aren’t. It’s not a good match. He did a pale blue for our dining room as an estimate and we really want something bright, like orange. I guess we’ll do it ourselves.

Professional list

1. Gain 3 new clients. This hopefully will happen through the Chamber, word-of-mouth and advertising next year.
2. Have all my current clients repeat sessions with me.
3. Order a couple of really nice logo shirts for me to wear. Sometimes I’m in an environment with other professionals and they are wearing their logo shirts and I have nothing but a name tag. A silly goal, but something I want to change.
4. Create and order a 16 x 20 collage to show clients at print delivery. I have everything, just need to make it and print it! I hope to do this soon, in 2009 I have one or two more print orders I can tag this onto.

Have a great Christmas and Happy New Year!

Over the past few weeks I’ve actually been pretty busy with photo jobs. Three new clients was my goal this year, I’ve actually had 5. I’ve also had 2 repeat clients. I also just did an event, which may turn into something else. Oh that’s another new client, so that’s 6. Wow, I doubled my goal! I also have one assistant. I’ve hired two but I’m actually looking at a different assistant to replace the one that can never help me.

We’ve been watching the little one for so long at night, that it will be weird to not have to watch her once the semester is over. She’s going to take EMS training so she can get nationally certified, that’s only twice a week. January through May 2010.

Hubby and I have a few parties going on this month. Two with his work and one for my annual cookie exchange. It’s only the second year in this house, but, I think it’s the 3rd or 4th year total.

Not much else really going on. Hubby goes back on the 23rd for a follow up appt. He’s pretty much back to 100% with his sense of smell. The youngest is going to the cardiologist on the 14th for an appointment. Hopefully it’s nothing, but I have a feeling it’s something.

Have a good rest of the weekend and I will try to post later in the week!

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote something here. I’ve been so incredibly busy.

We have been so blessed by a friend’s daughter. She is filling in the time gap between the time I leave in the evening and the time that hubby gets home from work. The youngest is taking night classes again this semester, so, usually I’m here, but, once or twice a month we need someone. It’s money well spent as the little girlie really loves her and she’s a sweet girl. She’s a client too, I did her senior portraits this past summer!

I had a family portrait session at the beginning of September. It went really well. I’m getting used to little boys and all the energy they have. The boys are 4 years old and 1 1/2 years old. Cute as can be. I have the photos, just waiting for the client to look at them so I can post them online to share.

I also presented to two BNI members that have uprising seniors next year. I think they will both purchase sessions. I also talked to a few people at the past few mixers that have high school students. I’m laying the groundwork for next years sessions now.

My mom is coming to visit next month. This is a good thing. We are getting along a lot better now than we did 3 years ago. I haven’t seen her since 2006 and she’s never met the little girlie at all. She will be here at the beginning of the month for a week.

I’ve been getting really involved with the Chamber of Commerce. I’m on my first non-military committee. There’s an annual event here that I’m helping organize and getting some insight and contributing ideas to. I also plan on helping out with another committee for an event in the Spring. We’ll see what the time commitment is. I try to do things in the morning, so I at least see hubby at night. It’s really weird doing things that aren’t military related. Good, but weird.

Last weekend found me on a bus with 7 of my friends and 20 others. We left early, early Friday morning and arrived in Ohio sometime mid-morning. I  made my first Longaberger basket! I also received another basket on the bus along with an wrought iron napkin holder. I bought two retired baskets. They are hanging on our wall in the hallway. One is for hubby to put his keys, sunglasses, phone and other work stuff in and one is for all the receipts and paperwork that always seem to accumulate on our island. I am hosting a catalog party next month, let me know if you want to buy anything. I hope to get an organizer basket for the kitchen, so we have a place for paper and pens. It was a good trip, but really tiring. We spent the day on Friday shopping, eating and then slept in the hotel that night. Saturday morning we went to a few places, then shopped in the mid-morning to early afternoon. Then back on the bus. We stopped at the site of Flight 93 on the way home. I’m really glad we stopped. I will post those photos on my personal and the photography Flickr this week. They are haunting. There’s not really memorial there, yet, but there are plans to add one. There were benches with the names of each of the victims that died in that crash. It just is sad that after 8 years, nothing really has been done. People have brought stone memorials and put them there, there is a 20-30 foot fence with tons of things on it, I have photos of that. People have left things as they visit the site. There are flags and a huge cross. It’s just a tragedy to me that the ones that fought back, are really the last ones to get any sort of memorial.

Hubby dropped me off at the spa yesterday, I had my hair cut and my eyebrows done. Also had a manicure. I haven’t been there since July, which is way too long for my hair to go without a cut. Then we went out to eat. It was nice.

Tomorrow at church I’ve been asked to take some photos. That wasn’t unexpected, but it kind of was.

I will try to post more often. I hope someone is still reading!

Jennifer wrote about The Working Mom vs. the Stay at Home Mom. Which reminded me that I too have been on both sides of this.

I never needed benefits because the military insurance covered everything, so, looking for jobs was pretty easy actually. People liked that I didn’t need insurance so, they offered me part time jobs.

I’ve had a full time job with part time pay or a part time job for most of our marriage. I sold Tupperware and Avon in the 80′s. I also worked part time at Lerner’s. (New York and Company now.)

The oldest was about 3 when I was hired at a bank in upstate NY. I was VERY excited to have a job, a career maybe. Being military you need to have skills that you can take with you when you move every 3-4 years. Banking, nursing, teaching are really popular with military families. Then, I found out I finally was pregnant with our youngest. We had been trying for years. Hm. This was a hard thing to do. I continued working and then when I had her, we used a sitter to fill in the times that hubby wasn’t able to watch her. On shift work it’s pretty set in stone, so there were days that he would watch both of the girls, which was great. I hated dropping them both off at the sitters. She was a friend of a guy that he worked with at the time and we liked her a lot. I always felt that because she was there and older, she would watch out for the youngest, and she did. Once we found out we were moving, I stopped working there and took a small cashier job for a few weeks to make some extra cash. That was in 1991.

I didn’t work outside the home again until 1995 when we moved to Georgia. I again found a job at a financial place. A credit union this time. It was a little easier this time as the girls were older. It was very part time, 3-4 days a week. Nice pay though as they didn’t have to give me any benefits! The youngest was in kindergarten and the oldest was entering 5th grade. If one of them got sick, I was able to leave to pick them up, or  he was. We were really lucky that he had a good job at the base down there. I was learning other aspects of the industry, loans, balancing the ATM, doing things that challenged me to learn. I stopped working there in early 1998 after being a victim of a bank robbery. I then decided that I wouldn’t work in banks or any place that would be a target for a robbery.

In 1999 I landed a job as an office manager at a truck garage. It was great part time hours, 9-1 every day. I really liked the job, it was challenging. I thought I was up for a promotion 18 months later, but, I was fired. They hired someone to replace me when I was at home helping my husband recover from his hernia surgery. It was at that moment in time that I made a promise to myself and to everyone that was in my family: I would never work for anyone but myself again.

In 2001 I started a hosting company with my hubby. We folded it in 2003 after many triumphs and some really bad times. We never did get the money back from our merchant company, it’s gone forever I’m sure. I learned a lot of things about blogs, MySQL, cpanel, everything.

We moved to Northern Virginia in 2004. I was still taking photos and I was asked to take photos for a neighbor’s wedding. He and his wife had about 12 people total including hubby and I and the youngest. That was in 2005. It was okay, I really did not like how the photos turned out. I had a Nikon CoolPix 950 at the time. A digital camera, but a HUGE digital camera.

In 2006, after our cross-country trip, I wanted to try to work again. I had taken some really nice photos on our 3 week journey, it was with our little Sony Cybershot, not even a good DSLR. The youngest was in high school, the oldest was on her own in Richmond. It was time. I applied for a job at a local, private nursery school. Three year old’s aren’t for me. After three weeks I was done. Plus we found out that she was pregnant with the little girlie, so I couldn’t work at all. She didn’t have the means to get around, doc appts. school, etc.

The little girlie arrived in the Spring of 2007. I took a lot of photos during the 2006-2007 time frame. I went to DC and took photos of everything. Most of them are still in my portfolio.

I bought my first real DSLR in June 2007. It was time for that! I loved it and still use that camera to this day. I took a million photos of everything. Of course of  the baby girlie, but other things as well. I worked for a sports photography business for a season in 2007.  It was so helpful in what I was doing, I still remember things that I learned there in that short time.

I’ve always taken photos. Ask anyone in  my family or any of my friends. I started really young with a camera in my hand, I remember being 6 or 7 and my grandpa helping me figure it out. He took wonderful photos. People, places, things. You name it, he shot it. He was a hobbyist though. I always thought that if he had lived in a different era, he would have changed careers. I like to think that he not only started me off, that he’s watching me now from up above.

We moved to Southern Maryland in January 2008 and I’ve been snapping photos ever since. I had just a few clients last year, this year more though. I’m getting repeat clients and new ones. Hopefully in 10 years I can look back at this entry and say that I have grown with clients consistently since 2008.

I totally agree with Jennifer when she states this:

I read on someone’s blog about how the blogger was a working mom and absolutely hated it. If you’re in that boat, then you need to step back and evaluate what can you do to make changes to live a life that you can tolerate. It won’t ever be perfect – but if you absolutely hate it, then this does not sound like a decision that is “right for you and your family”. You may not have the option of being a stay at home mom, or it may require changes in your life that you’re not willing to make. But that’s the trade off I guess.

Life is full of compromises and there are things you aren’t going to like doing. I’m 44, I like what I’m doing, right now. Hopefully in 10 years or even 5 years I can say that I liked this time period in my life. LIFE IS TOO SHORT. Seriously. Look at what you want to do, what you want to be, and do it. Life passes by in an instant and if you aren’t happy with where you are right now, change it. Have the guts, the nerve, to change it.