Sandi and I had our entire weekend booked up with shoots and somehow had to try and squeeze a little Christmas shopping in, all before Monday. I have to work at Comcast Monday to finish up a few projects before the New Year, and the entire family is heading down to Wildwood to spend the last week of December in a house on the beach, on the Jersey shore. So any shopping that sandi and I had left would have to get done before Monday.

Friday nights baby shoot wrapped up and after uploading all the images and cleaning the memory cards, I prepped everything for our big shoot we had scheduled for the next day, Saturday. The plan was to wake up, start processing the pics from the night before, get everything ready for a maternity shoot here in our home studio, and then make the hour drive to another location to shoot outdoors. The only problem at this point was trying to squeeze any Christmas shopping in, we didnt want to be out shopping late Saturday night with the rest of the crazy last minute shoppers.

I woke up Saturday morning to an email cancelling the maternity shoot...PERFECT! A little disappointed we were now out the money we would have made, but we were now able to get up and go Christmas shopping before it got too crazy...if that was even possible. BUT, at least it wouldn't be as bad if we had to wait until Sunday to go. 

Sandi, who has now taken over all and any scheduling since I just hate doing it, looked at me and laid out our new schedule for the day. Here it is....shopping for most of the morning and afternoon, maybe the movies, and then out to dinner at the place I had a band shoot to do at 9PM. 

Ding Ding....New email notification comes in.

Still in bed at this time, talking myself into getting up to go shopping...thinking of a way to talk myself out of going...its an email from my good friend Ray. Ray is a popular wedding photographer from our area, and the email is him asking if I would be interested in shooting a charity event an hour away in Linwood, NJ. He had been asked to cover it since the original photographer had cancelled and he had prior engagements. The event was a Big Brothers Big Sisters Christmas with Santa event, from 1:00 til 4:00, so we would have to leave the house no later than 11:45...totally killing the schedule Sandi had just laid out. 

No way...not a chance. No way Sandi is going to pass up Christmas shopping to now drive an hour to spend photographing a bunch of kids opening presents from Santa. Right?? 

WRONG. I handed her my phone and let her read the email. I seen her mind start racing, and then the reaction I wasnt expecting..."I'm in, lets do it".

So, thats what we did, and it was an awesome time. Amazing how things work out. I had no idea what kind of organization Big Brothers Big Sisters was besides the commercials on TV that I see every now and then. When the spokesperson got up and started to talk up on stage, as she looked out into the crowd of close to 100 kids, the first thing she said was that the organization has fallen on hard times. I dont know the details as to why the original photographer had to cancel, but Im glad that they did, Sandi and I left with a grin from ear to ear talking about how great of a time we had and how thankful we were to have made the decision to do it. Everyone that we spoke with and met from the organization were ecstatic that we made the drive down, and extremely thankful. We didn't need to be thanked and I think we made it pretty obvious that we were enjoying ourselves hanging out with the kids opening gifts and taking pictures of them together with their sponsors. Sandi and I have a little experience with sponsorship and what its like to be part of an organization like this one. 

I have a busy few days and plan on processing all the pics sometime this week, but just to give everyone a little taste of what we did yesterday instead of Christmas shopping...here it is.