I know I was supposed to write about Mal’s birthday party, but the week after his party was my week to do absolutely NOTHING! 
I will say that my baby’s 2nd birthday was a huge success. We all had such a great time. We had our family from the Apple Valley AND Vegas show up. That’s a 3-6 hour drive for them! They must love my kid or something.
These are the cupcakes I made for the party. From scratch. What?! They were so fun to make. I would make them again in a HEARTBEAT!
I used this recipe for the cupcakes, this recipe for the frosting, and THIS recipe for instructions on putting the cupcakes together. Big thanks to my mom and my sister for the help! (they were delicious, and I’m embarrassed to say how many I actually ate…)
This past weekend, I watched a workshop on creativeLIVE starring the AMAZING photographer, Jasmine Star. The course was all about building your photography business. I walked away from the workshop with 15 pages of notes and feeling soooooooooooooo inspired. Once I have this baby, I’m planning on heading at this thing full force. I just need to do it.
One thing that I am vowing to do is build my portfolio. For a while, I was mainly interested in fashion photography, which is why I was always organizing those crazy themed photo shoots. And while those were a BLAST and a really good learning experience for me, I know that it’s not the direction I really want to go…and the pictures that I took before don’t really benefit my portfolio in the wedding/engagement/portrait field. So that’s what I need to focus on. I’m going to start over and work on building my portrait portfolio. Plus, I need to get out there and second shoot. I am so upset because I actually had a second shooter opportunity offered to me (thanks again, Chuck!) but I had to turn it down because my husband works that weekend and we wouldn’t have a babysitter for our TWO (yep! two!) babies. UGH. Still, I know there will be other opportunities if I just keep pushing forward and putting myself out there. I’m really excited!
So, if any of my wonderful friends want to have a couples or portrait sesh, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!! Let’s do this.
Oh, one more thing. I emailed Jasmine Star after the workshop. Totally not expecting an email back, since this is an extremely popular photographer who has over 35,000 FB fans and who’s FB wall is constantly being posted on by her many adoring fans. But she TOTALLY emailed me back this morning. YES! SHE emailed ME back!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! I want to print it out and frame it. She has been my photographer idol since I discovered her a while back and I’m floating on cloud nine right now. I don’t think I will ever delete it out of my inbox.
Hope you guys have a great week!
Too cute!!!!