[bambino baiden]

Meet Baiden David Blue Eyed Boy. He is perfect. His mom and dad and grandmas adore him. 

I love his ears!

                  

[captivated:::an exploration of true beauty]

it's been a week of change. i finally broke my "natural only" vow and let my mom dye my hair brown. now we look more alike than ever. i got a haircut too. boo cut her hair to her shoulders, and we both succumbed to the removal of our wisdom teeth. our after effect of anesthesia was recorded, but i haven't seen it yet. the first thing i did when i woke up was ask for my teeth and then tell my mom that "my mind is all here!" right now we're eating sherbet up the wazoo!

many changes are in store for the fall too. one exciting one is that boo & i are leading a women's house church for ethos! we are so excited to see God move in the hearts of women and to see them encounter his mighty love for them. we are in the middle of working on a new stop motion video project with a beautiful song by our beautiful iowa->nashville friend Callie Weiss, but in the middle of shooting train cars going by from way too close (heart pounding!) my camera took its last picture. apparently in the year and four months i've had my camera (my second nikon dslr) i've had exactly 105,359 shutter actuations, which is about the life span of a shutter. rest in peace nikon II. i was really sad at first, mostly because the drive and urgency to create was right there for that project. since then i have peace. i don't know how i am going to get a new camera or what to do. i just asked the Lord to give me the camera he wants me to have. for me, part of being a good steward of what the Lord gives me is to USE it. i have no regrets about taking that many photos or wading into a muddy river to get the shot. i have many stop motion vids to show for it. pursue your passions recklessly i say! luckily, i got to do a photo shoot for baby Baiden before it died. (post to come!)

anyway, one of the tenets of our house church will be the idea of true beauty and the need to address the pain that most girls experience because of our society's handle on beauty rather than God's. last year boo and erin and katzxy (our nickname for katherine- it is pronounced Katchy :) and our ra cristen and i did a project called [Captivated: An Exploration of True Beauty]. we talked candidly about our stories and pain and God's definition of beauty. we shared from the amazing book Captivating by Stasi Eldridge. i highly recommend that book to women of any age or circumstance. there are just spaces in us that only God is meant to fill. anyway, the second part of [Captivated] was a photo shoot for all the girls. we dragged some dorm lobby furniture outside, got some peacock feathers and flowers, and paper and markers to write things that make us beautiful. it was a blast. we hope to do some more things like this in the coming year.

here are some of the posters advertising [Captivated] and shots of the girls!