I know I’ve told you all how jealous I am of people with sisters… now let me tell you how jealous I am of people who’ve grown up together like sisters!
That’s the story behind Jess and Katie’s friendship! They have known each other from birth (or at least as much as you can know someone before the age of 1) because their mom’s are best friends!
(These are their moms in case you were confused for a second there!)
Katie and Jess have been playing Barbie’s, dress up, and dreaming of their future as beautiful teenagers for as long as they can remember.
I’m totally making assumptions on their growing up activities… for all I know they climbed trees and threw dirt clods at each other… although I imagine they did the latter either way, like when they were mad at the other one for stealing the best Barbie.
(Now that my friends, was a run-on sentence (I secretly believe you can put an entire sentence inside another complete sentence as long as they have parenthesis around them… three dots also enable you to add on another sentence; ah the beauty of blogging grammar rules!).)
I do know for a fact (because their moms were spilling their secrets to us whenever the girls went to change outfits) that they have been looking forward to their senior pictures for quite awhile.
So when the time finally arrived, what better way to capture their lives than to do it with them living life together?! Awesome idea! I can’t even begin to describe the hilarity that was this session.
Over in one corner you have the moms oohing and awing and tearing up, while calling out poses and directions to their daughters. And over in front of the camera, you have the girls rolling their eyes at their moms’ sappiness, while trying to hide the fact that they secretly love hearing the constant comments on how beautiful they look.
Oh man, the dynamics of this session were just fantastic! The mocking, the “way back when” stories being told, the tongues getting stuck out, and the big giant hugs… it couldn’t have been better!
(I think this photo was a response to a story that one of their moms told about when they were little!)
Again, I stress, this was SUCH a great idea on their part!
Our goal with senior girls is always to enable them to indulge in their America’s Next Top Model Fantasies, while helping them feel like they are actually cooler than that because they’re so mature and down to earth (by the way, I’m not mocking this secret fantasy because I still have it and I’m way past high school!).
All this tension of wanting to be a model, but all the while wanting to act like they don’t give a care… makes it very hard for a girl to relax and be herself!
But having her best friend there who is fighting those same inner battles, makes all the difference in the world!
Having each other and both their moms there definitely helped the girls feel way more in their own element and we got to see their real personalities come out… which in the end is always our ultimate goal!
We did our best to get photos of the girls together…
…and separately.
(A guy walked by selling roses and we were so caught up in the moment that we bought some!)
Of course we had to make sure to get some with their moms and them together!
To add to their mom’s oohs and awws were my own (Breanna) because I kept being blown away by how crazy amazing these girls were at posing.
They were just popping from one perfect pose to the next all on their own.
We’d tell them to do a serious face and they’d hop right into it and straight into the smile after the first camera click, just ready for the next photo. Amazing!
Both of them were absolutely fantastic models and I kept gushing over how easy they were to shoot.
I mean, girls this beautiful are a breeze anyways, but when they are super comfortable with posing in front of the camera, you just can’t go wrong!
Along the way in this session, we ran into one of their friends who was getting his senior portraits done. They ran over to say hi to their friend and we ran over to say hi to his photographer… who happened to be the photographer we hired to shoot our wedding! If you haven’t seen Jefferson Todd’s photography… check him out! He’s a great guy who is one of our good friends and an equally amazing photographer! So anyways because we knew him (and his girlfriend Ashley, who was actually leading the shoot) we were bold enough to ask to borrow their model so we could get a shot of him with the girls. That was a lot of explaining for just one picture… so here’s the photo that all this hubbub was about! 😉
That’s the story behind this fantastic senior session (even though there’s really so many more stories within this story… just like there’s so many more sentences inside of this one sentence!). I’m sorry, but I have to say that I’m really proud of myself for tying in that grammar lesson so well as if I planned it that way all along… admit it, you’re impressed! Ha ha! But to bring me back down from pride cloud, I’ll admit that I don’t know how to spell “sentence” as I’ve learned after seeing how many times spell check flagged me. My wittiness is thwarted by bad grammar once again… bummer! Alright before I continue on that uncomfortably long tangent, what I meant to say was, it was so cool to be around people who have such history together.
(Take a moment to pause and say “Awwww” in unison because they are so sweet together in this picture. Sorry Tracy and Sandy, but our entire goal with these photos is to make you guys cry!)
It seems like Phoenix Metro is a pretty transient city and it’s so spread out that it can be hard to have long lasting relationships of value. Scottie and I find ourselves constantly hoping that we’ll one day end up in a strong community that sticks together for many years, helps strengthen our marriage, gives us loads of encouragement, and helps us laugh our way through both good and bad situations in life.
We pray constantly that throughout our lives, we can make friendships like the ones we saw here that will last through us raising our children one day (by the way, these children I speak of do not exist yet). It’s such a beautiful thing and we feel lucky that we were able to witness it with you guys.
You helped remind us that it IS possible and it IS worth the work that long term relationships require. So thank you from the bottom of our hearts to Tracy, Sandy, Jess, and Katie for being such amazing examples of time tested friendships. We hope you all know how blessed you are to have one another (this is another place for the united “awww”).
Breanna, you were so right with your comments. These are girls are the sweetest of friends! Lots of history and lots of laugh and love. You guys did a great job!!
You made an aunt cry, too. Beautiful pictures of two beautiful ladies (and their moms too).