Happy 4th of July everyone !!

I will not be in stinky , sweaty, hot Arizona this 4th of July.

I will be on the beach, with my pretty just painted blue toe nails in the sand.

I hope my camera doesn't get sand in it. that would be bad.

I cant wait for Beach pictures of my girlies. And my fabulous family photo shoot I have booked in San Diego. i am hoping for a location with colors. Lots and lots of colors. Anyone have any suggestions??

Then we will come home and get on a plane and spend some time with family in the heartland.I still have openings for Wisconsin/Chicago area sessions.

As you can see July is pretty busy for me . But I am booking sessions for August.

August in really Hot out !! So I am offering a beat the heat special of just 125.00 for a family shoot. Up too 7 people.

We meet at a location of your choice. I have some great places I can suggest. We laugh, we talk, we have fun. And two weeks later you have a cd of 20-25 rockin' pictures of your family. The seriously awesome part is you can print the pictures at a lab of your choice.

They are your pictures, you should have them :)

August is the last Month I will be offering the summer special so take advantage of it folks !!!

Growing up.

Today my oldest daughter Lexi started asking me and her Dad some really tough questions. She wanted to know things like why did September 11th happen, What happened at Pearl harbor and probably the most difficult one of all, How did Lost end ???

I guess this all a sign that she is growing up. I hear kids will do this from time to time. Thats why I love what i do. I take pictures of people at so many different places in their lives. Some times it is a baby about to turn one. Sometimes a couple who just made the decision to spend the rest of their lives together. And sometimes it is for a mother with her children who are grown up. But will always be her babies.

Thanks for coming out Jackie. You have a beautiful family :)

Enjoy !!

I wonder where she gets it from ??

Untitled from kennagurls on Vimeo.

We call daddy at work at least once a day. Myka babbles on and on to him. Its adorable.



In other news I am so excited for the next few weeks to come. From July 3rd through July 8th I will be in San Diego , CA. I will be sticking my toes in the warm sand and taking about 10,000 pictures of my lovelies on the beach. I am so excited to spend time with my husbands grandparents while we are there . Herb and Helen are so sweet. I would love to do a few sessions in Cali while I am there. The summer special is $150.00 and that includes a one hour session for up too 7 people and a cd of all your images that you may print wherever you would like. E mail me at laurenkenna@gmail.com or leave a comment with your e mail address and the day and time you are interested in.

Once we get back from CA , Me and the little girls will be heading to Cheese country and corn land. ( Illinois and Wisconsin ) I will be there from July 13th through July 26th. I am also booking sessions in that area as well. Same special. E mail me laurenkenna@gmail.com or leave a comment below.

I hope I am able to book lots of sessions. I would love to travel more and take pictures of fabulous families all over the world !!

Happy late fathers day !

i hope every guy reading this ( ok, i hope every woman who has a great guy in her life reading this) had a WONDERFUL fathers day. This post is a little late and for that I am sorry. But I have sorted out and processed a lot of feelings about fathers day over the years and tonight i said to myself Why not hash out all my feelings on the internet for the whole world to see.

Sounds like a plan !

This is my dad


handsome huh :)

Ok, so obviously I am not genetically related to a sculpture. But That statue represents the idea in my head I have of my Dad. As most of you know my dad passed away when I was a little girl. He was diagnosed with Lymphomia when I was six . He fought hard for four years. But God called him home the summer after we moved to Arizona. I was just ten years old. After My dad passed away my mom and I were at the mall when she spotted this statue in a store window. I remember watching her eyes well up with tears as she stared at the image of the firefighter in front of her. MY dad, the man she was deeply , madly, passionately in love with was a fire fighter before he got sick. My mom has told me that he was tall and handsome. That he was brave and kind. In that moment standing outside that window she saw her emotions in a work of art. She bought the statue and has kept it for 16 years now.

today was special.

As she prepares to move into a new phase of her life my mom passed the statue on to me. The timing is really appropriate.I am a adult now. I able to get through
fathers day with only a small lump in my throat. I think time has been a wonderful healer and of course I am comforted by the fact that I have a father in heaven who is king of kings and lord of lords. So I am a princess and all....

Oh and of course THIS GUY helps........



This is the guy who has been in love with me since seventh grade. The guy who I lost touch with for over five years after high school and I still managed to marry. This is the guy who is father to all three of my daughters even if only one shares his dna.

He makes me laugh. He is the smartest man I have ever met. He works full time ( more actually) and he is in school full time.

And he makes the worlds best eggs. Just ask anyone who has been to my house for breakfast on a Saturday morning.

I love my husband with all my heart. He is a great Dad. He needs like a apron with those words written on it. Next year honey , I promise.

ok,

sorry for the gush. i am normally not a gusher.

but it felt appropriate.

I will leave you a few pictures of our fabulous photogenic family on fathers day.
And a big shout out to Grampy Renny. Ashlynn thinks your the coolest.


Love You Aunt Meghan. And your necklace is so pretty.



and just in case you need to see a cute baby today

The Kidds

As many of you know I am a member of a awesome group of Moms called M.O.P.S . If you are a mama of a little one I HIGHLY recommend that you run, not walk and join your local M.O.P.S group. Go ahead I will wait.......



You done??

Good.

Now that we have taken care of that I want to introduce you to a Woman , and mother who I met trough M.O.P.S and has become a dear friend. ( and one of my best clients ). I remember when we did her first family session over a year ago. We met in the park and it was HOT ! It was July in Arizona people. The heat here is no joke. It was brutal. I had checked the weather before hand like I always do and the weather man had predicted nothing but hot and more hot. I though Our biggest obstacle would be the heat. I was so wrong. Right in the middle of the session the skies opened up and God sent Arizona a nice present. I imagine the amount of rain we saw fall would be on the same wave length as what Noah dealt with. But thats just my own op ion. Most families would have packed it in and rescheduled.

But Not my friend.

She smiled and laughed as we ran to find shelter at the near by armada. She giggled with her husband and asked me to take snapshots as they let their children play on the playground in the rain.

When the storm was over and the grass was almost as soaked as the children we marched up to the top of the hill where Stacy had found a sign that said peace in different languages. She told me that this is where she wanted their next pose to be. She wanted to remember the feeling of being cool because her clothes were wet in the middle of summer.She wanted to remember how happy her children looked because they had been swinging in the rain. She wanted to remember the day.

This year we did out session a little earlier in the summer. Still hot, but not brutal just yet. The Kidd kids were just a little older and so CUTE!!! Thanks for the memories Stacy. And thanks for the friendship :)

ENJOY !

lexi and Locks of love

I am so stinking proud of my kid. She is pretty rad. She has been growing her hair out all year so she could donate a ponytail to locks of love. Yesterday she came to me and announced in a very grown up voice that it was time. It was also time for little miss M's first haircut .

sniffle.....
wimper.......
wahhhhhhhhhhhh....

How did my baby get big enough for a haircut ? I must stop blinking. Everything is going by to fast. Lexi is old enough to understand how to be giving of herself. She made a choice to go without so that someone else may have.It makes my heart sing.
Myka is experiencing a new first every time I turn around. I swear she will be going off to college before I know it.

And Ashlynn got her bangs trimmed. My sweet Ash. Her hair has some more growing to do before she is ready to donate to Locks of love. And she has had her first haircut already. She truly is the middle child.

Sorry Kiddo :)

I heart babies.

The theme this week over at I heart faces is all about babies. This is one of my favorite images ever. baby G was such a doll.

I Heart faces friday fix it.

I love the i heart faces blog. I guess one advantage of this being the slow season for photographers here in Arizona is I get more time to have fun and participate in things like Friday fix it. This pic is from the I heart faces blog. You download it from flickr and then fix it up however you would like. I adjusted the levels and made the sky look like it was later in the day. Then I masked the adjustment off the woman and boy. Then i used a florabella action I have called milk and honey two. One of my favs, I finished it off with some burnt edge action courtesy of MCP actions. Let me know what you think. I love comments !!!

Why did you name her Myka ????

I was not one of those women who loved being pregnant. In fact I loathe it. Most women get these cute little bellies that look like they swallowed basketballs. I got a wide a** and a puffy face. When I found out I was pregnant with number three I belonged to a online forum of moms who were all due around the same time. It was cute how the first time moms took pictures week by week of their ever cutely expanding basketball bellies. But I had to laugh at the thought of doing that myself. My belly was a pile of extra skin and the two tacos I had for lunch. Nothing cute there people. Move along, no seriously, MOVE ALONG !!!
I was barfy for the entire nine months. And not the kind of barfy that eating a few crackers would help. I was zapped of energy and moody ( just ask my poor husband) No sir, me and pregnancy do not mix.
But in the midst of the barfing, weight gain , and mood swings there was one day I always looked forward to ( besides my due date). It was the day we got to find out if it was a boy or a girl. Imagine my shock and horror when the clearly inept ultra sound tech told me not with one child but with TWO pregnancies that they couldn't tell the sex of the baby !!!! The first time it happened with my oldest daughter I left in tears. Swearing up and down that I didn't care I just wanted to know ( total lie, I wanted a baby girl ). But , I was trying to be all mature about things.
My second daughter I was told had spina bifida. So I had lots of fancy high tech ultra sounds. We knew early on she was a girl. And she was FINE :) ( dont get me started on all the tests they insist on putting poor pregnant mommies through).
So my last pregnancy i waited patiently for the day of my ultra sound. My hubby took the day off work, and I filled my bladder to the brim with water. There was no way I was leaving that appointment without knowing the sex of that baby.
But, that baby had other plans. That baby wanted to close its legs and open them for no one. We tried for almost a hour. When i insisted i stand on my head to see if that would put the baby in a better position the ultra sound tech kicked us out of her room.


I was heartbroken.

So that night when we sat down to discuss names we both agreed that we wanted a biblical name. We opened our bible and started looking. As we looked we talked about what we wanted for our child. We knew that we wanted above all for our child to love God and love others. We wanted our child to be a world changer, to be a voice for those without one.
Then my husband remembered this verse......

Micah 6:8 (New International Version)

8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

And that was it. Boy or girl the baby would be Micah. When little miss Myka came into the world we did change the spelling. I think it sounds more girly. My husband thinks I'm nuts. But he went with it. I know she has some high expectations on her. But I think she looks like a world changer !! A clean one :)