One of the most precious moments in life is to experience a family bringing a baby into the world, & we had the privilege to share the Birth Day of Reuben Monroe with Josh & Amber Ulmer. Josh & Amber had asked us to document #babyreuben’s Birth Day Story, alongside awesome birth photographer, Amelia Hambrook, & we want to share our behind the scenes experience with you.

[all photos were provided by Amelia Hambrook]

Obviously, we don’t have any children yet, but we feel like we’ve experienced (secondhand) what it’s like to have a baby. We’ve been with Josh & Amber throughout this entire journey of getting baby Reuben here! Last spring we remember sitting on Josh & Amber’s back porch when they told us “We want to have baby #2.”… then (it seems like the next week) Josh called us one morning & said “Hey guys, baby #2 is on its way!”

Heather’s Experience
This was truly one of the best experiences of my life… like right up there with marrying Eugene! Amber did a fantastic job & Josh was right by her side the whole time! From breathing through the contractions to bringing little Reuben into the world, he was there holding her hand while staring into her eyes & reading her face to see what she needed. Since I was in middle school, I’ve been watching TLC’s “A Baby Story” & any other birth documentary in fascination & curiosity. I was sure I knew everything that was involved in giving birth… the technical terms, the procedures, the screaming… but I’d completely forgotten about the most important part -Love! Throughout Amber’s pregnancy, she & Josh showed me how much someone can be loved before they’re even here. It’s funny how you can spend so much time planning for a baby, then carrying a baby, then going through contractions for the baby, then within a short time a little person can suddenly arrive & change the entire feeling of a room!

I’m sure there are many of you who have personally experienced your own child being born or even someone you know, but this was totally new to me! I’ve always known that I would one day have children, but this has definitely moved me over the threshold of wanting children!

Eugene’s Experience
The biggest thing I wanted to be sure of while we were shooting this Birth Day Story is that we didn’t interrupt anything. We never wanted to make any situation awkward by being close (with a camera) to what was going on. We didn’t want Josh & Amber to feel like they had to act a certain way when we were around. You’ll see above that we ended up being able to get super close to Josh & Amber. Since they’re amazing photogs, they probably noticed us doing it. When we first started shooting we kept our distance and gradually would get closer, once we saw they were super comfortable with our cameras.

Once it was time for Amber to get down to business and have her baby, I couldn’t move next to her head fast enough:) I didn’t’ wanna see anything that would scar me for life:) It was amazing how quick everything happened next. It was like first there wasn’t a baby and I blinked and there was another lil Ulmer crying like crazy:)

I think one of the coolest things about this experience was seeing how supportive Josh was to Amber during the whole thing. He really upped the bar for when Heather and I have a kid!

Shooting this huge moment in Josh and Amber’s life was for real one of the coolest things I think we’ve had a chance to shoot! I’ll be honest…because of them, I really want to have a kid now.

We hope you enjoy the sneak peek below.

The music in this video was provided by: The Music Bed

Thank you, Josh & Amber for letting us share this most special day with you!

With this being the new year, we’re sure many of you soon-to-be brides have new to-do lists to tackle, & many of you video peeps & photogs have new day by day workflows to tackle. If you’re anything like us, at one point you’ve probably walked into your work area & felt even more overwhelmed because in trying to organize things & write down notes, you’ve created a sticky note monster!

Sticky notes should probably come with an instruction manual so you don’t end up like this guy. Until that happens, we’ve found an app that does “wunders” for you Apple users. It’s appropriately named “Wunderlist” & can be found in your app store. It’s compatible with Imacs, Iphones, Ipads…. anything “I”

Wunderlist

With Wunderlist, you can create a to do list & each task can be assigned a date to be completed by. Once you’ve completed a task, you simply click done & the task moves to a “Done” section. Then, within the “Done” section, you can view when your tasks were completed (ie. “Done Recently”, “Done Yesterday”, & so on.)

We’ve even heard of people using Wunderlist for their work out routines. So, brides & grooms, if you’re trying to knock out your work out routine to get that awesome wedding day body, this is for you! However you need to use it, it’s there for you Wunderlist has personally helped us with every day tasks, & now all we use sticky notes for is to write little notes to each other.

Welcome to 2012!

This year we’ve decided that we want to have a plan for everything! We spent a few hours going over “Things We Rocked at in 2011″ & “Things We Need To Rock at Harder at in 2012″ & came up with a long list for both. You always hear people say “Things can always be improved on”… & that’s exactly what we want to do. Always improve.

One of the things we definitely want to improve on is blogging. Last year we blogged pretty often, but then we also had our patches of not blogging. We’ve made a decision to come up with a plan every month of what we want to blog, then do it!

Keeping in mind what events we have ahead of us, we planned out all of January’s blogs. We even wrote them out on our calendar, just to keep us accountable… & there are many ways to keep yourself accountable, but we’ve found the best way for us is to just write things down.

At the end of January, once again, we’ll sit down & plan out all of February’s blogs… we want to be fair to you guys! It’s our goal for you all to know that you can come to our blog to catch up on things we’ve been doing, watch our newest short films, & of course see what things we have coming in the future …call it a New Year’s resolution if you will. This year we plan on rocking harder at blogging… & you all have our permission to call us out if we don’t!

[Always Improving.]

Hey folks! We’re so excited for our friends, Zach & Jody. We have an awesome announcement we want to share with you all, so we got together with them & created this fun little video…

For those of you who are unfamiliar with creativeLIVE, it’s the biggest online FREE resource for photographers & other creatives to learn from some amazing creatives. Past creatives who have graced the web through creativeLIVE have been Jeremy Cowart, Jasmine Star, Tamara Lackey, Vincent Laforet and many more… & the even more awesome part about this is that Zach & Jody along with creativeLIVE will be selecting 6 people to come and join them in Seattle to be a part of the audience! To find out all the details check out Zach & Jody’s blog…