Our Story - What We’ve Been Up To

{Essentially...Family-building! You moms and dads know how much harder this is than it sounds!}

This part of our story begins here, circa 2016. Our full love story is much longer. Maybe I’ll tell it to you one day…

Will and I (I’m Lauren, and I’ll be the one writing all of these blog posts) have been Wedding and Portrait Photographers since 2004, back when we were still in our Senior year of college (yep, we are college-and high school-sweethearts!). We have professionally photographed weddings and portraits for the past sixteen years and counting, and it has been an amazing ride. We’ve moved into four different studios, have photographed weddings all over DFW, in every little (and big!) town in Texas you could imagine, and we have photographed the most amazing destination weddings abroad.

Will and I at the 2016 Vendi Awards, where we were nominated by AACWP (the American Association of Certified Wedding Planners) for Best Photographer, for the second year in a row.

One of probably dozens and dozens of photo booth images we captured at weddings. We also had our own photo booth that Will built from the ground up, which we rented out for events. It was SO much fun!

Weddings used to be our main “thing”, and we loved them so much that they were a part of literally every moment of our lives. However, about four and a half years ago, everything in our world was about to change. I found out that I was going to be an Aunt (again! But this time, it was my sister AND Will’s sister, both having babies in the same year! The excitement that came over me was indescribable. Two new, precious babies to love and to spoil!). 

A very new, strange, and inexplicable feeling come over me. It was only something I’d heard of in movies and on tv: It was the ever-life-altering “Baby Bug”...

You’d think we’d have caught the Baby Bug before now, considering how many precious babies were all over the place!

…Better late than never, according to both of my grandmothers! Haha.

All of a sudden, we both wanted a baby more than anything. It was quite a turnaround from our previous happy-go-lucky cat life (we had...some cats. Heehee. And still do! Our first furry children were, again, spoiled). 

Calvin, our #1 cat. Don’t judge, you’d have a #1 cat too, if you had Calvin.

We wanted our baby to be born in the same year as their new cousins, and with that, we were all ready to become a family of three. 

But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Hit with miscarriage, the searing pain of our loss, and then a year later, a second miscarriage, we were thrown into a new world of infertility and loss that we had never imagined would be a part of our family’s story.

The losses affected me immensely, of course. I was really encouraged by the many, many women who reached out who have experienced it before me, and many who had experienced it after me as well. It is such a profound thing, to imagine your baby’s whole life laid out before you, to tell your family about your precious pregnancy, and then to have it all dashed away just as quickly. 

Credit: Google Images

We spent a whole year recovering from each loss. I’m not sure if that’s normal or not, but it deeply affected everything in our lives. All came swiftly into perspective, and we decided after our first loss to move from our beautiful studio on Camp Bowie that we’d had for many years to a more scaled-down option, in order to focus on building up our family. 

Whatever that might look like. 

Our Studio at 4909 Camp Bowie Blvd. Right next to Fort Worth’s Original Kincaid’s Hamburgers and the famous “Showdown Saloon”.

I loved this studio so, so much!

When our niece (Natalie) and then a few months later, our nephew (Diego) were born, it only intensified our desire to have a family of our own. By this time, I was already hitting what the baby-doctors love to call “Advanced Maternal Age” (which just means that you’re over 35, but feels like they’re saying you’re 85). If we wanted our family to come to fruition, we needed to slow our career down. 

Photographing our precious nephew, Lukas (Natalie’s older brother), a couple of years prior. This image was captured by Will’s sister, Britany.

Weddings are very physically and mentally demanding before/during/after the wedding for your photographer (constant turnaround of post-production being the most demanding part, actually). We’d always had a wedding scheduled, nearly every weekend. In order to slow our lives down to make it easier on my body to successfully grow a little one, we made the life-changing decision to transition into portraits and away from weddings. 

It was actually quite a grieving process for us to quit doing weddings, and I was pretty shocked by that.

I still have dreams that we should go back to them, and we both miss them very much. But in their place, we began to accept more of our “Baby’s First Year” series’ of sessions, as well as Family, Holiday, Headshots, and continued Bridal and Engagement Sessions, which we still absolutely love.

Newborn Sessions are, of course, still my VERY favorite! But getting to see each baby grow up through the year during the four sessions in the Baby’s First Year has also been something we’ve cherished even more (especially when it’s our wedding clients; getting to see your families grow, when we were there from the very beginning!).

Back to the Baby Story. After three and a half long years of trying (and feeling like we might never have a family of our own), we found out that we were pregnant again in August of 2019.

This past April, we welcomed William Leonard Aves V into our family; Liam for short. We call him Baby Liam. 

Baby Liam, being all cute and precious.

As of the writing of this post, Liam just turned five months old. I cannot believe that any of this was even possible after all of the ups and downs, but life now is so different from before. 

We are now photographing Newborn, Baby, and Child sessions with totally new eyes: The eyes of a brand new Mama and a Papa Bear who want to preserve every SECOND. 

We want you to remember the curve of your baby’s cheek, the dimples as they laugh, their tiny hands, nose, and ears...just everything. 

We will dedicate all of our energy to your precious loves in the same way that we love ours. 

We hope to get to meet you (or to see you again!) and to become a part of your family’s life very soon! 

XOXO- Lauren and Will