It’s that time of year again. The holidays are among us!

We wanted to take some time to talk about a few good things from 2020. Things were are grateful for and feel like we had to take some time to say thank you for! We did this last year and loved taking a few minutes to reflect.

With everything that we’ve been blessed with this year, there was no way we could skip it. It’s been a WILD year for us (some would say unprecedented), but even in the midst of the craziness, we saw so many wonderful things in our lives. 

1. Our Clients 

The first thing we are thankful for is our WONDERFUL clients. It honestly feels weird to us to call them clients, because we truly feel like they are more than that. Friends, people we come to know and love.

When everything began shutting down (for the first time), we immediately started thinking about our clients. 

Working in the wedding business, you’re working with clients who are planning one of the biggest days of their lives. While we love to see our business grow, at the end of the day we are trying to love our clients and want them to have a perfect wedding day, and hope to be there to capture all of the joy.

Here’s what we saw. We saw couples postponing their wedding days. We would ask them how they were doing, and how we could help ease stress. But, in turn, we had couples asking how WE were.

We had families of those couples sending us messages to ask about our business and say they were praying for us. We had past couples sending encouraging messages and hand written notes.

Those are the moments we will NEVER forget. 

From the very beginning, we’ve always wanted to put our clients first. We know how intimate and difficult a decision it is when choosing wedding vendors and that’s something we will never take lightly. But this year has shown just how much our clients mean to us and how much they touch our lives on a daily and weekly basis.

We have felt so loved are cared for, when really that’s what we were trying to do for others!

2. Our Family

Secondly, we are thankful for our family! The most obvious thing we are grateful for in regards to family in 2020 is how our family is growing! We are getting very close to meeting our baby boy, Grayson, for the first time. 

While this year has kept us away from family because of COVID, we have felt the enormous blessing of adding to our family. Pregnancy has been a fun season for us. From finding out we were pregnant in early June, to navigating a busy Summer wedding season while having some morning sickness, to shooting a very full Fall season in the end of the second trimester and finishing up in the beginning of the third. It has been a wild and wonderful whirlwind.

It’s caused some difficult conversations for us, but it’s brought us closer together. Being pregnant during covid has had scary moments, but ultimately has been so sweet. Mitchel and I have been able to spend so many moments together since he has been working from home. We have taken tons of neighborhood walks and gotten so much quality time together.

We’ve spent the past several weeks getting the nursery ready and it’s been crazy for us to imagine our little man living in his room. 

For us, it’s been a little scary thinking about our lives with a new baby during these crazy pandemic times, but overall we feel so excited and blessed to be where we are.

3. Our Business

Lastly, we are VERY thankful for our business and how it has grown in this wild year. 

Honestly, when everything started shutting down, we were scared. How would covid affect our business? We obviously didn’t know the answer to that. We started thinking about all of the possibilities, and it was overwhelming.

Surprisingly, inquiries for weddings still came in. People continued to plan weddings and book us as their photographers. We have been so shocked and just amazed at the ways the Lord has continued to grow our business and provide stability for us, even in these times.

Shortly after venues started restricting guest sizes and cities started closing down, we had a handful of couples that proactively moved their wedding dates. We thought it was only a matter of time before even more couples began to cancel their weddings and elope. 

Our ultimate goal was for our couples to be able to have their special day, no matter if it meant a smaller celebration, an elopement, or moving their date altogether. Obviously, since photography is my full time job, thinking of all of these possibilities brought a bit of anxiety. 

After a lot of prayers, conversations, and staring at a calendar, we knew that we just had to trust that it would all work out. At the beginning of the year, we had a goal of shooting 20 weddings. Even with COVID postponements, we  surpassed this goal and as of the end of December 2020, we will have photographed 24 weddings. We are so thankful, humbled, and blessed.

It’s wild to think that with everything that has happened around the world this year, our business has still grown, and that’s all thanks to wonderful couples, families, and friends. We’ve had nothing but support and love from those around us.

 

There are so many other things we are thankful for this year, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. Even though 2020 may go down in history as the “worst year ever” for so many folks, we are thankful to have seen and experienced real hope and love this year, despite all of the things that have been thrown our way.