!

Alright...I admit it...I kind of suck at updating this blog.

That being said, I knew I didn't want to go to bed tonight without writing a quick note to you all...it is a big evening after all...SANTA's COMING!!!!!!! (For those of you unaware, I think Will Ferrell is one of the greatest men ever to create films, so if you haven't seen his classics such as ELF, Old School or Anchorman, please take the time this lovely Christmas season to check them out.)

ANYWAYS, as we sit here sipping our Bailey's (with Gary's homemade candy cane ice cubes-the man's got talent), I started thinking...WOW, it's only 11:13pm on Christmas Eve and i've actually finished making all my gifts! Normally i'm up until at least 12:30 trying to finish my Grandma's calendar i've been making her every year since about grade 8... (and she LOVES the fact that i'm always running around like mad until the last minute to finish it...every year since grade 8). But this year, ohhhhh this year, i'm done at 11:13!! And thus, this blog post was born....

Ok updates:

1. Our invites are out-and for those of you who've already RSVP'd back, thank you SO much...as the rest of you will soon find out, the RSVP's include sending back a mad-lib, and so far we've gotten some amazing responses...some of which include verbs like: "have triplets", "consummate", "amalgamate", and my mom apparently made up a new verb: to "grandchild her"....so awesome.  So we wanted to let you know we LOVE the responses we're getting and can't wait for more!

2.  We have been listening to Michael Buble's Christmas album a little too much...2 fave tracks: Santa baby and Jingle Bells feat. the Puppini sisters...check em' out. They're addictive.

3. My sister pointed out that our invitations didn't include a time...but don't worry it wasn't a mistake! It's not on there because we have NO idea when our wedding will be! SO just make sure you're here by the 16th and you shouldn't miss it...we also may have lied about the location...of possibly the ceremony and the reception...but we promise the wedding IS for the two of us, and that it WILL be in Whitehorse...the rest, well, it's all a bit up in the air.  Nothing wrong with a little spontaneity is there?

4. Gary's candycane ice cubes are delicious...especially in bailey's.

5. It's Christmas eve, and I just realized it's now 11:23 and if I play my cards right I just might make it to bed before midnight which will be the first time in yeeeeaarrsss that's occurred.  SO, on that note, i'll sign off...apologies for the short post, and lack of real updates for that matter, but basically we just wanted to say:

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!

Next step will be to figure out our music requests, so stay tuned for a new years post where you guys can help us decide what the dance party will consist of...Matt Mills i'm looking at you...

Love Bri, Gary and Bill Murray.

It happened again...

A pizza night.

Before I get into it, let me just set up the scene for you.  We got up this morning to clean the house/studio as we had a family coming over for a Christmas shoot.  Normally this is a regular practice, but we've been so busy lately, that the clutter in our house was a bit more substantial than normal...probably adding to the 'mood' of the morning was the fact that I hit the snooze button at least 4 times, and finally rolled out of bed to Gary's voice yelling from the kitchen "they're going to be here in an hour!".

Hello Saturday morning....

SO, once out of bed, I proceeded to take my half of the clean up while Gary set up his camera gear.  This consisted of:
1. Filling the dishwasher
2. Cleaning up the counter which had receipts, mail, and last nights' Spiced Winter Ale glasses cluttered onto of it. (Local Company Plug time: Yukon Brewing is our amazing little local brewery which makes the best holiday ale in the WORLD...it's our favourite and i'm drinking a glass of it as I type...you'll have to do the tour!)
3. Putting in a load of laundry: BUT WAIT! SOMEone had left a pile of clothes in the middle of the floor blocking me even getting up to the washing machine. (HINT: it wasn't Bill Murray)
4. Bill Murray ate a pair of my underwear out of the laundry basket...i'm still waiting for him to 'dispose' of it...(NOTE: this isn't the first, or the last pair of our clothing he will consume)
5. Taking out the recycling...BUT WAIT! SOMEone had left a pile of clothes in the middle of the floor blocking me from getting out to the garage...(HINT: AGAIN, it wasn't Bill Murray)
6. Sweep up the tumble weeds of Murray fur that were rolling through the living room even though I just swept yesterday.
7. Make egg muffins for breakfast. (that part was good)

And then?? Photoshoot...which went really well and was quite enjoyable, thank you for asking.

SO after all that was complete, you'd think we'd sit down, say good morning to each other and enjoy some quality time on our Saturday! Ahhh but you are wrong.... instead we went downtown, and set up for our yearly gig of shooting Santa photos for the city.  Every year Gary is quite excited for this, and I always tend to be a bit nervous about it. Today we finally realized why.

Normally my mom, dad and our long-time family friend Dorothy help out as our 'elves', but because they're away visiting our niece this year, we had our good friend Carrie (who is amazing and we owe big time) come help instead.  At the end of the 3 hours, Gary was all smiles and Carrie and I looked like we both were about to fall over...you see, here's how the Santa photos work:
1. One person (this time Carrie) takes money/fills out forms...in other words, tries to juggle taking payment, writing descriptions of the children, answering questions, and trying to file people through the door all at once.
2. The next person (that would be me), takes the parent's info, tries to get the kids pumped up that they're next in line to see the man himself, OR tries to calm them down from their "there's a large man in a suit that's about to kidnap me from my parents arms" crying fits.  I then have to re-explain process to the parents and get the next kids ready to go so that the lineup can keep moving.
3. Gary gets to take photos and eat candy canes.

He loves it...and don't get me wrong, it's actually a super fun job, but it's also crazy tiring....

Which is how this long winded story lands us back to the beginning of this post...a pizza night happened.

So i'm sitting at the computer 10 minutes after we got through the door, starting to edit photos, when we decided we both were going to pass out if we didn't get food soon. SO, Gary gets on the phone and makes a pizza order...the difference? THIS time as he's ordering he loudly states: "Whole wheat crust please" into his phone and winks at me... (NOTE: if Gary never had to eat whole wheat ever again he'd be a happy man...so this was obviously a 'cheer me up'/'thank you' dough choice.

What a sweat heart eh? Just looking out for his future wife to be...
45 Minutes passes...We bite into our first slice of pizza and pour ourselves some Spiced Winter Ale, and in that magical moment, the moment our Saturday night finally begins, Gary exclaims:

"Whole whheeeeaaaaaattt! See how much I love you?? I ordered whole wheat crust on this pizza! I sure as SHIT didn't order it for me!"

Que: "Love is all  you neeeeeeeed".

Carrie and I pre-Santa Photos...you don't want to see the after shot...

Decisions, decisions...

Ohhhh MAN we're bad at this...

So, after many discussions we thought we had made a decision...but we thought wrong.  Turns out picking the venue for this thing is harder than expected.

We wanted to make sure we get married somewhere that fits our style...aka somewhere with lots of trees because I dress like one half the time and Gary likes to sleep under them. (What can we say, we're part granola/hippy).

SO that was an easy decision considering you can literally walk 5 min behind our house and be out in the middle of the woods...the bigger issue is where to hold the reception.  hmmmmmmmm....

"You mean finding a location to hold an event in Whitehorse is difficult?? I thought you guys had TONS of options up there!" I'm sure that's what you're all thinking...but nooooo.  Let me tell you, there are only a few options, and having shot weddings in most of them, we are slightly picky.  So we wanted to make sure we found something that fit a few of our criteria:
1-Good lighting for photos (because we know how bad it sucks to shoot in a room that's essentially a black hole for light)
2-big enough to have an amazing dance party (because you better believe there will be 80's hip hop dance battles happening)
3-Somewhere that doesn't force you to go with their catering service
4-Somewhere local so everyone can cab home (We thought about a tenting wedding out in the woods, but we know some of you city folk might not enjoy that)
5-Something big enough for all our guests, but not so big that it looks like you're holding a grade 8 dance all the cool kids were too cool to attend.

Again, let me remind you...not a lot of options in Whitehorse.  SO needless to say, I suppose this post is basically to tell you that we have made no decision at all! BUT rest assured...we are working on it! We are talking to two different venues right now and as soon as we know where it'll be we'll be sure to fill you in.  Worst case scenario, just make sure you bring some hiking boots and we'll all party down in Bill Murray's favourite swamp behind our house! (Just kidding...sort of...)

Love Bri and Gary

PS...on a totally unrelated, but super important to us note, we'd like to introduce you all to our beautiful new niece Anna Clare Croucher! She lives in NFLD with my sister and bro-in law and has officially kidnapped my parents (who are now first-time grandparents) for over a month...I have warned them they better come home before this wedding...

Photo by D-Dog (my dad...aka the new Grandpa)

The Engagement

Okay, seeing as how we've already been getting questions as to when we'll actually be updating this thing, we specifically decided we had to check two things off our list by the end of this weekend.  They are as follows:
1. Engagement photos
2. Make invitations

Now, we've been meaning to do these for a while now, but have been so busy with clients that we kept putting it off and never getting around to it.  When you take photos for a living, it turns out taking fun ones of yourselves kinda gets pushed to the bottom of the list...especially since Gary is THE WORST at being in front of the camera.  (I'm allowed to say this because he's the one who said it first)  He does this thing where...well, let me just give you some examples:

Needless to say, he can be difficult to work with.  I, however, have this amazing ability to look stunning at all times when a camera is pointed at me...I don't know what it is, it just comes so naturally to me...

Ok, ok i'm done. But in my defence I was just trying to warm you up so that you weren't too shocked by the results of our engagement shoot...So back to my story...

After procrastinating for weeks on getting this shoot done, we finally decided to just 'book' ourselves for a night to ensure we'd actually get it done, and the results are...well, very 'us'.

Shooting weddings/engagements for a living, we figured this whole process would be easy.  The thing we forgot to think about was the fact that doing this for a living has also made us have (and by us I mean mostly Gary-again his words, not mine) short attention spans when it comes to doing photos for ourselves.  This leads us to trying 'different' things out...getting 'creative' with our concepts.

So we tried out a few different looks, some of which you'll be seeing on our invitations that are currently being made (yes that's right, we've actually made progress!!).  So we didn't want to ruin the surprise of the invites by showing you the images early, but i thought we could give you a sneak peek at the very least...

May I present to you, the "swap" By Gary and Bri

Bet you can't wait for those invitations now can ya??....

How it all began...

I know we're supposed to start this with the story of how we met, but instead i'm going to start this with why we decided to do a blog for our wedding...

We got engaged about a month and a half ago, and have basically done nothing since except pick a date...(June 16, 2012 in case you didn't know)...apparently we're really good at photographing weddings, but are terrible at planning our own...go figure.  We know what we like and what we don't like...we just don't know how to make decisions...

A real-time example of this: we just were discussing how we're starving because we skipped dinner, so Gary suggested we order a pizza...he started to list off all the dirty pizza places we could order from at which point i made faces as all sounded gross.  I'm just saying...perogies don't belong on pizza...  He then replied "Oh my god, it's so much more fun to eat when you're not home."  Que the song "loooove is all you need".... Luckily, after some debate, we came to a compromise to order pizza as long as we got one that included spinach... (Marriage prep #1...compromise.)  Also note, it's 11:07pm at night...that's how long it took us to realize and make a decision on dinner...i'm telling you we have to get better at this planning thing...

ANYWAYS, the actual point of this blog is not to tell you about our pizza battles, but to keep you posted on what we're thinking of for the wedding.  And although we don't have it all figured out yet, what we do know is that we feel super lucky to have such incredible family and friends in our lives and that we can't wait to be able to celebrate with you all next spring. (and to finally have those of you who aren't from here, come see this crazy beautiful place we live in).

The pizza should be here soon, so i must run, but we'll be updating this often with ideas on places to stay while you're here, places you should check out, and the progress of the planning...whenever that starts...


Bri and Gary

PS...This is Bill Murray...he's pretty excited to see you all too...