And the only downfall is that I may have to pay them royalty fees one day when a photo I took of their daughter makes me a fortune.

Boop!!!

The monster was THISSSSS BIG!!!

ACHOOOO!!!  Bless you, little one!  

“That is enough pictures for today, Meredith.  I need my beauty sleep!”

This is Meredith signing off…hoping you liked the pictures…and also hoping you will let her know what you think…and also hoping she can take your pictures too!!! 

Come spend the night with me and you get soft drinks out of glass bottles…because glass bottles are just great!!!

And this is what happens when an artist finds herself in the bedroom of a future teacher…  She made teeth with a hot glue gun.  It doesn’t get any more creative than that. And what better breakfast is there than a bowl of lucky charms?We got on my roof.  How cool is that?

Coolidge Park

  I’m out!!!

And so it begins!!!

And now some paparazzi  pictures… And I loved the way they were standing and holding each-other so I wanted to get some areal shots so I stood on the bench that both of them had just sat on and fell all the way through.  I broke the antique bench in my in-laws-to-be’s front yard.  Ugh.  Haha.  It was quite entertaining.  Sorry Lorraine and Bruce. And just in case you were wondering, we got the bench back together.  We just didn’t stick around to see if it would hold anyone up anymore. Hope they are all you hoped they would be.  I had a blast taking them and playing with them the past few days.

Lots of love,

Meredith

  The walking bridge..this is for people who can’t walk on water like Jesus but want to go from downtown to North Chatt where all of the fun lies.  

The walking bridge should really be called the running bridge.  Because that is what all of the cool people do on it.

Welcome to North Chatt!!!

The Chattanooga Aquarium

Watch out for these suckers.  They can be the death of your bank account.  You will get tickets.  The city of Chattanooga stays running because of these things.  Park in the UNUM lot and walk.  It is much safer than trying to keep the meters fed.  

This is where the Chattanooga Mocs get their game on and where all of the famous artists come to make their music.  And best of all, it is where the circus comes with their tigers and elephants and clowns.  And not that I care, but the monster trucks do their thing here, too.

You can walk to anywhere worth going in Chattanooga.  Do it!!!

Chattanooga is in Tennessee, not Georgia.  But this street is home away from home for me.  I make a homecoming every time I am waiting for a green light at this intersection.

This cute little patio table is located at what they call the Bluff View Art District.  There is art on a bluff.  And there are fancy-schmancy restaurants there too. Some of the art on the bluff.  It looks out over the river towards the walking bridge.

The Hunter Museum of Art.

This is Coolidge Park at night…and that is the walking bridge at night.

I would like to thank Bachman Academy for allowing me to share this day with them.  I love all of you!

And just for laughs and giggles since I didn’t take this one…

Mr. Break Dancer

Now, 10 days later, I have finally gotten around to doing some color enhancements.  I know you either hate it or love it but I think they are fun. 

If only we all had such passion!  What joy and emotion.  This is exactly why I want to spend the rest of my life around kids.  I don’t care whose kids or what kind of kids or what age of kids.  But I want to be around faces like this.  The faces that know little pain and never wonder what this whole life thing is all about.  They just live.  They are fearless because they don’t know any better.  And I don’t think that is such a bad thing.  I wish I could live without doubts and fears and worries.  Maybe if I did a camera could easily capture what I can with my camera.  Kids’ eyes just glow with life and freshness.  Being around them makes me seek that.  When I am it tends to rub off.  How can you stay mad or stressed or depressed when that is what you get to witness?  When you smile at a kid they smile back.  When you laugh a kid will laugh not knowing why they are lauging.  I am going to be a teacher.  And more than anything I want to teach my students to hold on to life, not take it so seriously.  I will teach them.  And it will not be all fun and games.  But I want learning to be fun.  I want them to become just as passionate about the world around them as they are about the life inside of them.  They’ve got lots of curiosity, my job is just to direct it.  If I can find something to teach my kids that brings them as much joy as that parked jet ski brought to my cousin, Wade, then I will count my career a success.  

Give em a jet-ski and teach em how to ride.  That’s what I say. 

305 words…what do you say?  What do they say to you? 

Ju

I have had the pleasure of teaching some pretty amazing children in the past couple of years in several different educational environments. Three schools…probably hundreds of different kids…and along the way learning from some pretty amazing teachers. My first teaching opportunity happened at Scenic Land School, a school for children with learning disorders. Here I helped teach young dyslexic children how to read and express themselves in unique ways. More recently, I have worked with some of the same teachers from Scenic Land at a school in McDonald, Tennessee called Bachman Academy. One of these two super-fun kids was one of the first kids I had the chance to work with during my freshman year of college. He was a stubborn one and took a lot of prodding, but he learned to love learning just as I did once prodded. He sometimes has more energy than the typical teacher would like to have in her classroom but I feel kids like him just make teaching more of a challenge and adventure. He cracked me up and drove me crazy. His imagination was beyond me. With a stick in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other, he became a soldier camouflaged in the woods behind Bachman. I just needed to find a way to help him see that the dead people he was supposed to learn about in school actually did that with real equipment. It was never hard to get him reading a book about ninjas or soldiers or knights. I will keep that in mind when it is finally my turn to be a “real teacher.” 

This was a day that I had the pleasure of accompanying several students to the Chattanooga Aquarium and watch them stand fascinated at the sight of a torpedoing penguin, try to catch a butterfly on their hand, and pet the backs of sting rays. Learning has such a greater impact when you can see it somewhere besides a textbook…when you can feel it with your fingers, watch it happen in front of you, listen to someone who was there when it happened, or just go into the woods with a walkie-talkie and imagine what it felt like to really be there. I know I would be a whole lot smarter if that was the kind of learning I did. I can’t wait to learn along with my students and watch them learn to love it just like I do. 

I truly cannot wait to be a real teacher. Come faster December 18^th…I mean 19^th…graduation…and stuff!!! 

423 words 

Not a thousand so I will show you more pictures…. 

I think they thought he was the one in the exhibit.  Hahaha. 

This kid has ADHD.  We couldn’t get him to sit still for anything.  But we couldn’t get him from one exhibit to the next one. 

After I no longer had to feel stupid about finding him worth my attention, I began to open up. We became friends. Turns out I had to try too hard to keep him from seeing the smile behind my eyes. Then I began to see his eyes were smiling back. I thought maybe he felt the same way. His eyes were smiling at me too, but he never did anything about it. I started to think he was a just a flirt, you know, one of THOSE guys. Then on Valentine’s Day I found a king-sized snickers bar with a “secret note” sitting on the windshield of my car. With that came a long phone conversation between two people who aren’t phone people followed by the perfect Chattanooga date experience. He parked his car on 4^th street and we walked across the walking bridge for some Clumpie’s ice-cream in Coolidge Park. Who knows how long we spent on that park bench talking about everything over a scoop of Oreo ice cream I forgot I was going to share. It was perfect. I learned that there was so much more to this guy than the mystery of the kid-loving California boy with long hair and tattoos. Then a walk back to his car, then a “not wanting the night to end” statement said by this boy, and a walk to the downtown hotel to see my mom and my sister who had just arrived for a weekend visit. It was in a conversation with my mom that the move back to Claremont first came up. I remember a bit of my giddiness easing, but not disappearing. I made a mental note not to fall for him, just to enjoy it while it lasted.

That plan didn’t last very long. This picture was taken just a few weeks later on a weekend spring break camping adventure at Cloudland Canyon. Never had Brian had such a large gulp of outdoor air…aside from the sandy west coast beaches. On the first morning of the two-night camping trip with a small group of our friends, we awoke to the surprise of three inches of unexpected snow. IT WAS COLD! Very, very cold. But it didn’t stop us from taking in the beauty of the place we came to see. We hiked and saw it all under a thick blanket of snow through the small opening between our face-warmers and our hoodies We were trialing a group of experienced outdoorsman. This type of exploring was nothing new to them. It was as if they were making a game of it. How much can we see? How fast can we get there? Brian and I were too busy being amazed at the quiet beauty that surrounded us, and taking in what was beginning to develop between us. We let them go ahead. There wasn’t much to say. Well really there was too much to say. So we didn’t say much at all. He didn’t say what he thought might scare me away. I was just trying not to let him hear me telling myself that I couldn’t fall for him.

The next morning our friends had to hit the road for home. And the cold snap followed them right out of the park. Because as soon as we were ready to walk around again, there was no need for ski jackets, long-johns, and gloves. We left the tent in just pants and long-sleeved shirts. Not too long after that, a tee-shirt was plenty. It went from feeling like a spring break ski trip in Colorado to feeling like a spring break should feel. And that is the condition you have found me in the picture.

We were nearing the end of our hike and there was a moment where my heart ignored my head. And then it was too late. I know the moment that my heart decided that it didn’t care what lied ahead. I wouldn’t let myself believe it was love until later, but it was. My heart knew what my head ignored. It knew the wall I had built around it wouldn’t be there for long. So there I am in the tree. Brian is standing on the ground laughing at me sitting up in the tree that was bent in such a way that it begged to climb into. And I am looking back at him with a face that is somewhat mad that he had let me fall for him, yet not mad enough to hide my smile. Little did I know that the man behind the camera had already decided he wasn’t leaving me behind…ever. Somehow he knew it would be worth it.

Picture #1

February 16, 2010

Worth more than a thousand words: 1117

Wow.  I have not been able to put serious effort into this passion of mine for a while now.  There’s been classes and running and studying and trying to find time for the important people in my life.  It hasn’t been an easy task to balance it all.  But somehow everything has fallen into place and I have gotten to where I am right now.

I am sitting at my computer doing two things I really love to do…make that three.  1. writing  2.playing with pictures  and 3.stalking people I love on facebook.  Seeing peoples’ smiles or trying to make people smile is something I love to do.  Getting to capture that on camera is even better.

I am laying in my bed at my family’s new(ish) home in McKinney, Texas.  I flew into Dallas today.  I just spent a while in Knoxville with one part of my family.  I got to see my brothers and sister play in some basketball games.  My bias has nothing to do with my proclomation of their dominance on the floor.  I hope it shows in my pictures.  Nathan is in 7th grade and is #41, Carter is in 5th grade and is #2, and Lauren is #41 just like her big brother.

We spent Sunday afternoon at my gradparents house in Crossville, Tennessee having an early Christmas celebration.  The highlights of the day were the 48 hours of great music I downloaded onto my siblings iPods.  There was lots of Solja Boying going on in the living room.  Oh, not to mention that Brian and I recieved the coolest Christmas present.  We got a new digital video camera.  I am so pumped about it.  It even takes pictures so I don’t have to decide which one is cooler.  I have a feeling my camera would win.  I will leave the moving pictures to my man.  Hey, maybe we can start  business…me the photographer, him the videographer…any takers on the ametures?  Let me know.  We may be famous one day.   

  

And finally we took pictures for the Christmas cards.  Though they are huge Tennessee fans, they also cheer on the hawkeyes because that is where their mommy went to school.  And this year since they were so fantastic at football they decided on a fun and casual photoshoot in their Iowa gear.  We had to work with a setting sun on a cloudy day in a muddy park.  Considering the conditions, I am fairly impessed with the results.  What a good looking family…  

Merry soon-to-be-Christmas Family and Friends.

Here’s my life from one side or the other of my lens. 

I hope all is merry and bright

No matter the weather outside 

I pray that your soul be full of joy

Remembering Christmas is about one little boy

It’s about the light that he came to bring us

May we remember the one who shines down within us

Lord, help us not to lose Christ in our Christmas.