All packed up...

...and ready to go! This has been a busy week trying to get everything packed and get utilities switched over and all that fun stuff. We're getting the moving truck tomorrow and will have everything out of the house by tomorrow night and will be closing on both houses on Friday morning. We're so excited to get into our new house!

Here are some pictures from the past few days that I wanted to share.

I tried my hand at giving Zachary a haircut for the first time the other day...amazingly it was halfway straight! :-)

This is his new way of pretending to talk on the phone. He sticks his finger in his ear and says "bye". It's so cute! He also uses whatever toy is in his hand as a telephone. Do you think he sees his mommy on the phone too much?! Elaina has been wondering why we haven't gotten a "Sold" sign put up, so I told her she could make us one. She did a great job! Now everyone will know that this house is SOLD! :-)Here's the last picture of the kids sitting on the front porch of our "old" house. This house holds many precious memories, but we look forward to making many more memories in our new home. Okay, I just teared up as I typed that. I've been so busy through this whole process, I haven't really had time to think about the fact that we're leaving our first home. We closed on this house on Elaina's first birthday, so she opened a key to the house as one of her gifts. That's always been a special memory for me. We're now just a little over a month away from her 7th birthday, so I guess she'll be getting a new key this year, but we're hoping there won't be any more keys for a long, long time! :-)

Sold!

That’s right…sold! We are excited to announce that we have sold our house! I’ve been waiting to mention anything on the blog until we knew more of what was going on, but we’ve had our house up for sale for the past 2 and a half months, which is why I haven’t had many posts lately. I never realized how time consuming it was to sell a house! Our lives have been consumed with fixing up the house and having agents show it to potential buyers. Having to keep the house spotless with 2 kids and then having to constantly leave for people to come see it has really taken its toll on us!

The story of how all this got started is too long to get into here, but to sum it up, we decided to start looking for something a little bigger and were blessed to find a house that had just about everything we were looking for. And oddly enough, we ended up knowing the sellers from college! We’ve been under contract on this house (here in the same town) for about a month and have just been waiting to sell our house in order to go forward with everything. After what seemed like years, we finally got an offer on our house last weekend. We are planning to close on both houses in just 2 weeks! Whew…we’ve got a lot to do in a short amount of time, but praise the Lord for His goodness and answer to prayer! Our entire summer has been consumed with this whole house thing and we are ready to get it all behind us!

I’ve had several portrait sessions in the past few weeks that I’m looking forward to sharing photos from, so I hope to have several more posts popping up in the next few days.

Newborn Portrait: Alexandra

One of the many exciting events of the time we spent in VA a few weekends ago was getting to meet my niece's new baby girl, Alexandra. She's a beautiful bright eyed little thing and she's the spitting image of her daddy, but hopefully she'll grow out of that...just kidding Will! ;-) I can tell already that she's going to be a "Daddy's Girl" and both her mom and dad are going to be wonderful parents!

9 Years and Counting

Ryan and I celebrated our 9th anniversary today. Yep, we were married on the 4th of July...the day we "lost our independence"! ;-) You know you're past the romance stage when you celebrate your anniversary by going to the mall to buy a washer and dryer! We all went dressed in matching red shirts. Ryan said we looked like a circus act.

Tonight, the kids and I went downtown where Ryan was doing a live shot for the 10 and 11 o'clock news and we watched the fireworks down by the Reedy River. The fireworks didn't seem to phase Zachary, unlike Elaina who cried the first time we took her to see fireworks. It was a long night, since we waited around until Ryan was done with his 11 o'clock live shot before we headed home because traffic was horrible for a good hour or so after the fireworks were over. Elaina enjoyed sitting in the live truck and watching a real live "live shot" going out on the air and Zachary actually stayed awake and happy through it all.

Zachary excited about his first fireworks:

Ryan shooting the fireworks for the news:

Elaina watching Daddy's live shot:

Engagement: Heather & Derek

I wanted to share some photos from my engagement portrait session with Heather & Derek at the Rock Quarry last week. I had fun working with them and Heather's adorable dog, Lucy, who played a major role in Derek's proposal with her cute little "Will you marry me?" t-shirt. Working with animals definitely adds a whole new dimension to portrait photography, but it was fun! :-)

**CLICK HERE TO VIEW THEIR SLIDESHOW.**

I'm looking forward to the lucky wedding day on 07-07-07!

Zac's First Haircut

Another big event happened over the weekend...Zachary's first haircut. I've been holding out until his first birthday, so I got my sister to cut it while we were in VA. As a former hairdresser, Melody has gotten the honor of giving both Elaina and Zachary their first haircuts. I wasn't sure if we'd be able to keep Zachary still long enough to actually get it cut. I figured we'd end up with only half his bangs cut or something, but Melody was super fast, so she had them cut before Ryan could even switch out from the video to still camera. (Of course we had to document it with every media format we had!) ;-) Here are some before and after pictures...we left some curls much to Ryan's chagrin, but as fast as his hair is growing, it won't be long before those will have to go too I guess. :-(

More pictures of the birthday boy:

Birthday Boy

As the lack of posts lately may have shown, it's been busy around here. I'll share more about what all has been going on in the Goodman household later, but for now, I wanted to share some pictures of Zachary's birthday party from this past weekend. He turned 1 on Sunday. I can't believe that my little baby is 1 year old already!

We went to visit my family in VA over the weekend and had a party for Zachary there. He wasn't very happy about having to wear his birthday hat, but he LOVED his birthday cake! :-)