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April 2024

The Stork and the Beanstalk

A Mother's Journal

A photo journal comprised of my thoughts on motherhood and other life happenings, as well
as some of professional work as a photographer. Southern California is home.

Month: August 2017

Portrait Series | August

by Ashley filed under A Portrait A Week Project

08.31.201708.31.2017

A portrait of my family once a month in 2017

Willy: Wore a Canadian tuxedo to a wedding, complete with a bolo tie (straight from the kids’ closet) and somehow I forgot to take a single picture.

Hooper: Told me that on really hot days you can rub spit all over yourself. Works just like sunscreen, he says. Then he demonstrated.

Van: Dropped my external hard drive on the brick floor, rendering it useless. Ho hum.

Sonny: Has had a long time desire (relatively speaking anyway) to brush his teeth and finally got his own toothbrush. A week later, I found him stirring urine in the toilet with it.

Also, voted worse to sit next to at a restaurant causing willy and I to rock-paper-scissor-it-out to determine who has sit near him.

Me: Somehow have avoided taking the kids to school, thanks in much part to wonderful neighbors and a handsome-works-from-home husband.

Jimmie: Isn’t put off by the bleach tablets we put in the toilet, though his liver might be.

An Anniversary

by Ashley filed under Life, Meet Your Parents, Motherhood

08.29.201708.29.2017

For our first date, he took me to a fancy Hawaiian fusion restaurant. We sat at the bar and ordered fancy drinks that only adults order; partly because we were both a bit nervous and awkward and partly because we wanted to own the title of adult all 20-somethings yearn to claim. We talked, we laughed, he drove me home afterward – to my parents house, where I was living at the time – you know, when you’re in-between here and there. I had just returned from life on the road with Janet and though my physical belongings sat in the room I grew up in, my spirit still felt fiery and restless. It’s the first time in life I felt complete ownership of and confidence in my self-awareness. It wasn’t lacking before, just still being molded.

He kissed me in the driveway, the oak tree hanging overhead. It sounds cliche to say I knew he was the one, but I knew he was the one. That night was only the beginning.

We have reservations tonight at a nice restaurant on the beach. A treat to one another. We laugh thinking back to that night, to that $100 dinner that was so out-of-form all those years back. And how I confided them the same confession that I confess tonight; that I’d be just as happy going to Denny’s.

Happy Anniversary to my one true love.

Baja

by Ashley filed under Family, Travel

08.28.2017

I have no handle on time these days and as bad as I’ve yearned to sit down and tend to this space, time just slips away. I have loads of pictures to share from all our summer adventures so I figure I best get to postin’. Summer went incredibly too fast, as it always does, and the days we spent away from home seem to far out-number the days we were here. The endless game of pack-unpack-catch up-reset-repeat. I can’t say I’m happy to have the boys back in school (Van is now in kindergarten and Hooper, in first grade) because I tend to favor the freedom of summer and all the adventures (even with all the chaos). So we’re adjusting to the change in schedules and to the setting of alarms. The silver lining resting, I suppose, in being able to sit down and hit ‘publish’ on a long overdue post from our time in Baja, Mexico.

In other news, hope everyone in Texas affected by the hurricane is safe. Keeping y’all in my heart.

Childhood Unplugged

by Ashley filed under Childhood Unplugged

08.01.201707.25.2017

A cold bath on a hot day down in Mexico. I remember bathing with my own sister as a child, the tub transforming to fit the mold of whatever our little imaginations could think up; a milkshake stand, where we used the sliding glass door as our pick up window, those little tablets that -when soaked in the water – transformed into different sponge animals, and the countless tails of My Little Ponies we groomed.