Melanie+Ryan+Scarlett+Raven // Halloween Family Session

Halloween is quite near and dear to our hearts. My birthday is in October, and I’ve usurped Halloween as my own personal holiday since I was born. Then Geoff and I were married on the 23rd with a Halloween-themed wedding, and basically Halloween all year, Halloween all the time, Halloween Halloween Halloween. We met Melanie and Ryan some time ago, and they are ALSO Halloween Halloween Halloween in ALL THE BEST WAYS! We were unfortunately unavailable to photograph their wedding but they’ve returned to us now with their sweet daughters Scarlett and Raven and booked us for a Halloween family session and we were SO EXCITED!! Their decorations are quite impressive, and we’ve learned we need to up our outdoor game a bit. They also have the most fabulous and wonderful collection of tiny little Halloween houses that light up and have moving ghosts and they’re all very elaborate and spooky. We had Christmas houses like this when we were little, but had I known Halloween houses existed, my parents would’ve been in trouble.

So we hung out with this Halloweeny crew at their place, checking out their decorations and running around the house playing! Scarlett is a brave and strong girl, who doesn’t flinch when her dad turns the corner wearing a terrifying clown mask, but instead attempts to block him with a Wonder Woman arm maneuver while still trying to hold onto some M&Ms. Raven loves the Zombie Man in the yard, and the giant inflatable spider down the street at a neighbor’s. She also adores the Chucky dolls upstairs in their attic, but isn’t quite okay with the terrifying clown mask yet (we’re working on it). Both children love their Halloween balloons, candy-dispensing mummy head, and the giant rubber rat sitting on top of their play kitchen. They also enjoy telling Alexa to play “This is Halloween” but forget the Danny Elfman part so Alexa plays the Marilyn Manson version and the kids hide. Melanie and Ryan enjoy horror movies (surprise!), getting their pictures taken with Robert Englund, collecting wonderful horror movie art, and being our heroes. Cheers to this spooktacular family of ghouls and ghoulettes! We are so happy to have been a little part of your boooootiful Halloween season.

Meei+William+LeXi+LeXuen // At Home Session.

Are my fellow American blog readers prepared to feel really inadequate when it comes to the number of languages you speak? Good! You’ve come to the right place. Meei contacted us a while back to do a family session with her husband and two daughters. They love the age of their girls and wanted to get it documented (and we agree; 1 and 3 are super fun ages!). We knew that Meei is Chinese, and we knew we’d have about a 5% chance of pronouncing her full name correctly, but she was super nice about our American handicap and told us to call her May. We also knew that her husband’s name was William, so we were 100% confident in our ability to pronounce his name (we were right!). But what we didn’t know is that William is actually Dominican! And William speaks Spanish and Meei speaks Chinese! They met while they were living in New York and they speak English to each other! And William speaks Spanish to the kids and Meei speaks Chinese to the kids and the kids respond in Spanish to their dad and Chinese to their mom and English at school and I’m sorry for all the exclamation points but this is so impressive to an American who took 6 years of French class and forgot everything! Holy smokes. We were and continue to be incredibly impressed by these trilingual kids and their parents. Such a cool family. The best part of our job is meeting people from all over the world and hearing about their experiences. So glad this family got to be our clients this year!

Jodi+John+Jack+Nicky+Winnie+Maci // Family Session

If you live in the Raleigh area you’ve surely picked up a copy of The Indy. And if you’ve read the Indy, you’ve probably seen an ad somewhere along the line that pictures a tiny floating head of a smiling woman giving humorous advice out of a speech bubble on a 1960s-esque funky background. Below everything reads “Jodi Foy – The World’s Nicest Dentist.” When we first moved to Raleigh, I saw another dentist exactly one time before I became captivated with Dr. Foy’s ads and told Geoff that we needed to switch to this woman who was claiming to be the world’s nicest dentist. Turns out that she is, indeed, the world’s nicest dentist, but she is also the world’s most hilarious dentist, the world’s most-into-photography dentist, and the world’s biggest champion of the Carolina Hurricanes dentist. We love her and all of her incredible staff (“The Foyettes). And if you need a new dentist, she has the official dentist CSP endorsement.

This was our first time turning the tables on our jobs and us working for Jodi and her beautiful family! Her husband is a super nice guy who is very close with their dog Winnie, who has been sick, and they wanted to document some of their life at home with him, their smaller and younger spitfire of a dog named Maci, and their boys Jack and Nicky. Jack and Nicky are incredibly polite and really nice kids who have two hobbies that seem to occupy 98% of their time and attention: hockey and anything involving Star Wars.  Jodi is an awesome hockey mom who takes them to practice and supports them at all their games (and takes a lot of fantastic photos!) while John plays with them in their driveway at home. Together, they are a really, really fabulous family. We’re so grateful we found her head floating around the Indy all those years ago. :)