welcome

Yesterday was my One Year Anniversary with CrossFit. I distinctly remember the day I signed up. I went shopping for jeans last October. And my normal size just didn’t fit anymore. But I refused to spend money on on a pair that were a bigger size. So left the store, drove home, and emailed my local gym to start classes.

I went in for the test workout. I couldn’t do 1 pullup. I couldn’t do the 20 pushups without taking a break. I was EXHAUSTED after a very short workout. But I wanted to keep going. So I went back two days later. And then two days after that, and so on. I was sore for weeks. But I noticed small changes that kept pushing me back there.

When I walked into the Ferraro home, I had two immediate thoughts. 1. “Oh my goodness, why can’t my home look this clean?” and 2. “This is the coziest environment I’ve photographed in.” The light was gorgeous and it smelled like there was a delicious candle burning.

A lot of times when I photograph a family with children, it’s chaos. Organized, loud, fun chaos. And to be honest, I love it. I laugh the whole time and have to rise to the challenge of wrangling little kids and convincing them to smile at my camera. These sessions give me a unique energy that I don’t get anywhere else. I’m so immensely grateful for my families with littles for this reason.

The winter season has officially started, therefore it’s time for me to start my round of annual illnesses. I kicked it off with a bang, ushering in last week’s first snow with a hearty stomach bug.

My dad tells me that if I just ate better and exercised, I wouldn’t get sick as much. But I have made significant changes to my diet and my lifestyle over the past year and I’m not really expecting this winter to be much different. Some may call that pessimism, I call it being around too many children. Anyway … what I know about the stomach bug:

Lindsay found me through the wonderful Snow family so I knew that I was meeting some good people when I got to their house for their photo shoot. 

I photograph a lot of children. A lot. And most do pretty well. But they are still very wary of me and my camera. They take a little while to warm up and make me work for their smiles. But not these two kiddos! Asher was straight cheesin’ from the second I got there. (Lindsay and Drew … have you ever thought about a little child modeling?) He was cracking me up and I can’t imagine that his cheeks weren’t sore from smiling so hard the whole time. 

Sometimes I hate the term small business because it’s just SO vague. A small business could have employees, and offer retirement plans to said employees. A small business could make a million dollars a year, or sometimes less than $10,000. 

I used the term teeny not to belittle myself, but to be a bit more realistic about what I’m doing over here. We’re less than two years in and I’ve only paid myself once, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves with all this small business talk.

That said, here is what I know about running a small/teeny/functioning business:

As a fledging little business, I always ask people how they found me. It’s one of my favorite parts of this job. I can trace almost every session to a previous one and that one to one of my very first sessions. It’s like this little web of Green Chair Stories people that only I can connect in my head. It’s just about the most fun thing ever.

I say this because I LOVE how the Richter family found me. They are good friends with some of my favorites: the Dawkins family.