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Well, I’m back in business… not that I actually took much time off, but my regular clients knew my availability would be shot for a week and slow for another, and I’m grateful to them for their patience! Due to our child being born 11 days late, I had closer to 5 days completely off but everything has worked out great.

It’s been a wild 2 weeks. Briefly: August 17th around 4pm, I went into labor. My husband and I watched The Hangover and had a light dinner before labor got more intense. We’d planned for a home birth with our wonderful midwife Mary and her assistant Amy, the help of my friend Kristy, and 2 of our photographer friends documenting the experience as a team. By about 1:30am or so, it was clear to our midwife that this baby wasn’t going to come out easily. We got to the hospital affiliated with an OB friend of hers and I was admitted and given an epidural around 3am. The hope was to take away the pain but still gain some progress by 6am. That didn’t happen, and I went in for a (non-emergency) c-section at 7:30 that morning.

At 7:47am, with my husband (and his camera) by my side, the doctor pulled out our baby and my husband declared (twice), “It’s a girl!” We were totally ecstatic! I’d like you to meet the newest, most important person in my life, Amaya Natalie DeLisle. At birth she weighed 9lb, 8.2oz and was 21″ long (no wonder her home birth was not meant to be!) She’s a good eater and thankfully a good sleeper, and allows me stretches of time to be in the studio while she snoozes adorably.

Will this blog now turn into mommy central? No worries, friends. That doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally share Amaya with you or tie-in my new life as a mom in a hopefully insightful way (okay, and sometimes just so you can get to know me a little better.) This is a blog about voiceovers and life, and now my life includes being a mom to a cool little person, but I’ll save the majority of the baby/mom stuff for our family blog. I’ve worked hard over the past 13+ years to build a career that began in radio and directed me towards voiceovers, and now that we’ve started our family I feel like I’ve got the best of both worlds ahead of me. Thanks for following my journey.

All through college, my partner in crime was my friend Kristin. We were the laughing too loudly too late, closing down the coffeeshop, rewriting song lyrics, running around 24-hour stores late into the night/early into the morning, mostly innocent sort of trouble-making duo. I was so happy she came to visit me and Andy this spring. We took her up to Sedona and the Grand Canyon (oh, how horrible to have to go back to these places every first time friends come to visit us here…) and here’s a few photos from her time here.

While the rest of the country is cold, admittedly I’m enjoying the moderate weather in Phoenix, where we don’t have to worry about defroster settings on our cars or pipes freezing overnight. Being from the east coast, I do miss the cold every once in a while. So, when Jared, Ray and Allison came into town in late February, we did a 2-day trip up to Sedona, Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon.

While Laura was in town in February, she and I went to check out First Friday events in downtown (see thispost), went to some kind of delicious chocolate festival and walked around Bobby’s Rock at the base of the Echo Canyon trail at Camelback Mountain. We had our cameras and although it was too early for really nice light, I found a nice spot for some portraits of my good friend.

We checked out the Phoenix Art Museum and I especially enjoyed the lighting inside and outside. Below is the side-effect of something unofficially called “no flash corner.”

There’s also a cool exhibit I always have to go into when we go to the museum. It’s disorienting and very peaceful at the same time.

Andy and I weren’t able to get back out to Colorado to see her family and her baby until just a few weeks ago. If you’d like to meet him now (as opposed to whenever I work through photos from Feb-Nov and post them here!), Andy just shared his photos on his blog.

I’ve spent considerable time today working on a backlog of photos I’d had sitting on my laptop for months. I used to be so much better about this, posting pics from trips and friends’ visits within a week or so of when it happened. So without further delay, here’s part one of my photo update! This is from when my good friend Laura came to Phoenix to visit for a weekend. Andy had left for the Southern Short Course photojournalism workshop that weekend and it allowed for a lot more girl time. We didn’t stay up late braiding each other’s hair and eating Twizzlers like we did in high school, but nothing beats time with awesome people who you’ve known so long they’re just family.