Baby Maple Pearly

I had the honor to call on my sweet friends, Janée and Bayard, just days following the birth of their gorgeous baby girl, Maple Pearl.  There's nothing like being welcomed into that fleeting bubble of newborn blessedness to capture the little moments that will all too quickly be past.  It's easy to forget how intense the newborn parenting experience is.  The exhaustion and emotions along with the gratitude and bliss.  There were many times I wanted to tear up just listening to dear Janée's birth story (one of an empowering natural VBAC) and more tears welled up as I watch my friend Bayard care for his baby girl with the tenderness and vulnerability of a new Dad.

These photos are being shared with permission of the family and I am proud to have been welcomed to document for these beautiful humans.  It is my hope that I will be welcome to serve more families in our community in this way!

xo




Please do not take or use any of these photos without permission.
All photos copyright Nicolette Gawthrop 2014

Weekending

We spent this past (unusually warm for January) weekend at Table Rock Lake with our dearest friends. It was an easy get-out-of town filled with quality time, food, laughs and beautiful Ozark scenery. Over the past several years, getaways like this have seemed too far and few, but as the boys are easier to travel with and the husband's work life seems to have reached nice equilibrium, we are very happy to be seeing and doing more, together. 

Table Rock Lake is about an hour and a half Northeast from our home. The drive to is just beautiful.  Every season that I have taken the drive has offered a different but equally beautiful landscape with so much to see. The hibernating deciduous dominant hillsides were bare but their naked branches allowed for the clusters their evergreen friends, and the white tops of the sycamore trees to pop out. On the drive up, I saw three eagles roosting on the highest branches of a sleeping oak, and on the drive home the sunset sky-show was a very memorable one. 

Starting as a wispy display of golds and grays with brushes of peaches and blue, pink and purple met deep red and eventually settled into a disorganized rainbow- stunning behind the blackened horizon.  Every few miles as we wound around bends in the road, the colors morphed and deepen and lightened depending on our vantage. It was a lovely end to a lovely weekend, and a great start to the week. 

Wishing you all a colorful week ahead. 

xo  

Circle of Life

I'm on my way out the door but wanted to post a few photos that I found from around the change of season several weeks ago.  We are expecting the fall leaves to be taken by the wind in the coming days and for the temperatures to plummet.  I don't lament the changes in weather or the loss of seasons, simply because knowing change means that you are alive, and being alive is good.

We lost a chicken this weekend.  Blondie was preyed upon under the Full Frost Moon on Thursday night.  Out of sheer laziness and a false-sense of security, I did not latch the gate to the coop before crawling into bed.  I feel like an asshole, and I'm sad because we won't see Blondie run across the yard with her cute Zoe Deschanel-jogging-gait.  She was willing to let us hold her on occasion and was the sweetest surrogate mother to the chicks that she hatched and came along with to brood late in the Spring.  She wasn't even supposed to stay with us, but since we weren't certain the hens she had roosted with at her home coop would take her back, and we took such a liking to her- she stayed. We will miss collecting her eggs, and I'll probably frame a few photos of her for around the home.  Cherishing, especially, this last one from the time I was home alone and Blondie wondered in through the back door and I let her look around until I thought we were close to the 'dropping a turd' zone, then corralled her back outside.  The boys loved her, and so did I.

On Saturday, I piled a plate high with noodles and bolognese for Blondie's Brood- a sort of "Sorry I got your mom killed," feast.  I imagined they were searching for her when I saw that they were foraging on the far side of the yard which they had never visited to my recollection- which was where the trail of Blondie's feathers led.  Truth be told, I am freighted to happen upon her remains but have a sense of responsibility to find her all the same.

It's all very circle-of-life- I know that she was nourishment for other living things, and I hope this all doesn't read as if I feel that Blondie's death was some sort of tragedy- I don't feel that way at all, but I do miss her- in the same way that I will miss this season but will never mourn that it passed.