We arrived in San Miguel de Allende yesterday afternoon after a gorgeous drive from Leon through the countryside of Mexico. It's so lush and beautiful here, and the town is made up of thousands of tiny cobblestone streets leading from one treasure to the next. My friend Maari Christante is here with me to shoot Annah & Morgan's wedding on Saturday and we're like little kids in a candy store with our cameras.

Anyway, we woke to a rainy morning today so before we venture out to find breakfast I thought I'd post a few shots of our home for the week. We're staying in the sweetest little house in Colonia San Antonio and the first thing we did when we got there was flop on the beds....

the front patio:

the lower upstairs balcony:

and steps to the upper upstairs balcony.

view from one side of our balcony:

and from the other side!

while i was shooting on the balcony, maari accidentally locked me out of the house. And then had trouble letting me back in.....I think it was planned.

And our little backyard.

We grabbed some shots around town yesterday afternoon, so I'll post those when I have more time. Adios!

I'm heading out to San Allende de Miguel early tomorrow morning for Annah & Morgan's wedding, so I'll be returning messages when I get back into town in about a week.

In the meantime, here are a few quick shots from Amber's day after (or month-and-a-half after!) shoot yesterday. I am LOVING the shots we got and I can't wait to show you all more! Amber completely rocked this shoot.....

Hopefully we'll have web access down in Mexico -- if we do, I'll do my best to blog while we're down there!

I am so far behind on blogging, and I know everyone is anxious for more wedding images! I promise they'll be coming soon. I'm so busy processing proofs and launching galleries and filling orders that I haven't had much time for blogging lately. So in the meantime, I thought I'd post some images from my nephew Liam's shoot back in April. Big man turned 2 last week, and I can hardly believe it. He is now speaking in full sentences, answering questions with emphatic responses ("YESSS!" and "NOOOOoooo"), and thanks to the handy and slightly insane 3-day training system, he is now 100% potty-trained. He also pulls a few fancy stunts here and there.

A few weeks ago he came over to hang with me for a couple of hours. Here's the scene: Liam and I are sitting at the kitchen table. He's eating some watermelon. I'm shelling some peas. Liam looks interested in the peas, so I put a few in front of him and he starts munching away quite happily. I look down for one hair of a milli-teeny-tiny-second at the pea pod I'm shelling, and when I look back up, he's got his finger fully up his shnoz. He looks at me, blinks calmy and says, "NOOOoooose."

Oh yes. That tiny little pea was jammed right up there. And not just inside his nose, but way, WAAAYYYY up. You're never gonna see that pea again up. After a few moments of panic from me, lots of giggles from Liam, and a ridiculous amount of fake-nose-blowing from me, I finally managed to get him to blow it back out. Crisis averted.

Anyway, in addition to being quite entertaining, his shenanigans make for some great photos. Here are some of my favorites from the last shoot we did -- on a 95 degree afternoon this April. We started out on the little playground at the school nearby.....

Uncle Jed came out to help and got roped into going down the slide a few times, too!

Here's the infamous "point". Liam's not a baby anymore, but he still has those great little chubby baby hands....

This was the exact moment where Liam learned what "static cling" means.

Then we headed over to grandma & pop-pop's house for a ride on his favorite thing in the world.....the tractor. Here we are, looking for the tractor.

....And getting angry when his mom decided to feed him a banana before the ride. Nothing stands in the way of Liam and his tractor.

Pop-pop came out and surprised Liam in the middle of his tractor ride. Liam is CRAZY about Pop-pop.

The end of the story is.....Jed is now sporting a big punk rock mohawk.

The beginning of the story goes something like this.... Earlier this spring Jed mentioned that he was thinking about getting a mohawk this summer. My response? "Excellent! I think that'll look great. Let's do it." So we made a plan....sometime during the summer, we'd get out the clippers and I would create the masterpiece. That was the plan. And it was a good plan.

But the plan went oh so wrong.

Or I missed a crucial piece of it.

Because the other night, Jed got the razor out.

I was downstairs, completely oblivious. Just watching tv and innocently eating an ice cream cone, when I felt the tiniest twinge of instinct kick in. Something was wrong. I ran upstairs, followed the light...and when I got there, my jaw dropped.

There was Jed. With the razor on the lowest possible setting -- the setting you put it on to TRIM SIDEBURNS -- not cut hair. The ridiculously low setting. The bald setting. And he had shaved off one whole side of his hair. And because he had apparently been shaving with one hand, and unable to really see what he was doing while he worked, not only was it extremely short, but there were clumps -- huge jagged clumps and spaces where it seemed he had pushed down a little too hard on the clippers, and the hair was just missing altogether....

"BUT.... WE HAD A PLAN!!!!" I yelled out, ice cream cone still in hand.

A little late for that.

There was nothing to do but take over the job and try to make the best out of what he had already started. Of course, he would have had a mohawk either way, but I like to imagine it wouldn't have been quite so....frightening if I had had my way with the clippers from the start. But with Jed, that's how things go. He keeps life exciting and unexpected, even when you think it's just an ordinary hair day.

So back to the end....Jed is now sporting a big, sweet, gelled up mohawk, and may be until the end of summer when he goes back to work at the high school where he teaches.

And it's pretty hilarious.

Except that now when I get up in the morning, I have to do my hair....and Jed's. I never would have imagined he'd be so happy to plop himself down on a stool in the bathroom and endure the pulling and yanking and blow-drying and the application of product upon product upon product that I have to go through to get his hair to stand up like it does....but he is.

So for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of seeing him yet....here he is -- my very cute punked out husband and his new prized possession: the 'hawk. :)

How Carmi managed to finish med school in Boston, trek out to New Jersey less than one week later to arrive at her wedding completely gorgeous, relaxed, and the perfect picture of a gracious bride -- I'll never know. But, she did it.....and it couldn't have been a better day. Of course, her excellent planner Stacey Kallenberg of As You Wish was there to take care of all of the details, which I think may have helped a tiny bit.

Carmi & Mike (you may remember them from their sneak preview) were so sweet and so much fun to shoot. They were married at the gorgeous St. Stephen's Parish in Kearny, New Jersey, and their reception took place at The Palace at Somerset Park. Their excellent band Vali brought some crazy sound and I risked getting jabbed in the face by a rogue elbow to get a few of the crazy dance shots, but the party was so wild, it was 100% worth it.

I thought I'd change it up and do a slideshow this time. To start the show, just click the play button below and give it a few seconds to load. (Be sure to turn your volume down if you don't want to hear the music!)

(Also, big thanks to my buddy Jan Thiessen who came out to second shoot with me for the day!)