My awesome husband aged this weekend, and we celebrated his ability to continually get more attractive with each year by heading up to Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia for a long, restful, peaceful, blackberries-set-to-off extended weekend. A full-on vacation, with doggie & all. If you've ever visited the area, you know how simply gorgeous it is... (all captured with point & shoot)

We spent a good deal of time in the hot tub!

And lots of kayaking...

Can you believe my 6 year-old got this shot?? I don't even want to tell you how many times we had to do this for it, though :)

...and this fun one? That water was COLD, too!!

Boating around the huge lake - Sophie was thrilled ("faster! faster!") and sweet Caleb just wanted the ride to stop...

Back to solid ground, happy, happy.

...Which of course kicked off a water fight. I say water fight, but really it was more like two kids who were just recipients of water thrown in their direction....

Glory's favorite part of the trip wasn't all the swimming or romping or rolling about - but sniffing the clean mountain air...

And, finally, an image that I just love:

Love this family. :) When the Masek's arrived for their shoot, little Caden was blissfully asleep. The GOOD kind of down-for-the-count deep sleep that eludes most of us after about age 10.

zzzz.....

He was not psyched about being woken up for photos

So we let him rest and got started instead with his big brother. Brice needed zero warm-up.

Okay, finally Caden decided he was ready for his close-up.

I don't know why but baby sneezes are just funny

Whew, so "blogging" is definitely at the top of my to do list for this week because I've been sadly out of touch lately. :) In an attempt to buy a little more time, I thought I would post this shot of the beautiful Lisa from her wedding this past weekend at the Washington-Duke Inn. Rarely have I seen a bride so composed on the big day as Lisa was. If she was nervous on the inside, she hid it well! I snapped this shot of her as we were waiting on Peter (her now-husband) to join us for a few pre-ceremony shots of the two of them.

Dana, her sister and her mom drove a couple hours in from Wilmington for our bridal shoot - and she showed up READY. She looked beautiful, of course, but she was also very much herself, easygoing, fun, adventurous - all traits that I saw even more of when I spent their wonderful (!!) wedding day with them in Atlantic Beach, but more on that later.... :)

This was Dana's mom's favorite :)

And Dana's dad's favorites...

A beautiful floral compliment to the sleek updo...

This one looked amazing as a 20x30 at the wedding...

A different feel...

We popped into Healing Waters Day Spa to get this one... They were quite kind to let us in, considering there were five of us meandering about on our photographic adventure (our talented Rachel Garrison joined us for the fun of it) - I assured them it wouldn't be an every day activity but I've been wanting to play with that pearlesque blue.

Will post photographs from the beautiful wedding at The Coral Bay Club soon!