My shelves full of LOVE – Happy Valentine’s Day

I spend a lot of time in my “office” as a photographer doing a variety of things like editing, emailing and calling clients, developing marketing plans, and being an accountant just to name a few. It’s not always the fun stuff of being behind my camera capturing beautiful stories like so many think.

Early on, I decided if I was going to be at my desk more than I would be away from it, it needed to be a place full of love and inspiration that I enjoyed being in and looking at all the time.  That is how my Shelves of Love were born. These are right above my computer and they bring so many great memories flooding back every time I look up. What better day than VALENTINE’S Day to spread the love and give you a little idea of what is on my Shelves of Love as I call them.

So to break all the love down, on the top shelf we have (from left to right):
**A scrapbook I gave to Jordan our first Valentine’s Day together. I had just moved to NYC so we were doing the long distance thing for a few months. I worked so hard on it. I printed a ton of pictures from our first year together, included tickets to different things we’d done and inside jokes as captions. I love going back through it and seeing how our story began.
**Our college degrees. Yes, we went to huge rival schools but thankfully it doesn’t get in the way of our relationship – only during football season.
**A little blue Tiffany’s box that he gave me on our first Valentine’s Day. It had a promise ring in it that I still wear every single day.
**The colorful couple in the middle is a little treasure I found sitting in the trash in our building. If you know me, you know I love to find little goodies and give them a good home. This was one of them. I think I might have just been a little envious of her ring 😉
**The giraffe is a wood carving I bought in Thailand a few years ago which has been my favorite trip to date.

On the bottom shelf of love (from left to right):
**Fun BLP records, documents, yearly plans, notes from classes and ideas to be explored.
**Pictures of Jordan and me. One from a trip to Charleston where I made him get up at 5:00am to drive to the beach, watch the sunrise and take pictures. He was such a good sport. He never complained once (to me anyway)! The other is from one of the many USC games we’ve went to in Columbia.
**In the middle, we have are tower of wine corks. Most of them are ours that we’ve kept over our years of dating. We do enjoy some good wine. Every time we open a bottle, I take the cork and write the date and occasion on it then put it in our collection. I’ll eventually make a frame with them in it. It’s fun to go back a remember what we were doing then.
**There’s a few shells from our trip to Costa Rica we found on the beach.
** The boxes at the end are filled with random things for my desk and some keepsakes we’ve kept from trips, shows and activities we’ve done over the years.

I hope everyone has a beautiful Valentine’s Day regardless of your plans. We are doing something really low key that we never really make time for. We are going to the movies to see Identity Thief and grabbing food at a local place.

And a special Happy Valentine’s Day to my Valentine.  I can’t even begin to put into words how amazing this man is. I never would’ve imagined I’d be so lucky to meet and fall in love with someone so awesome and perfect for me <3  To all the love birds out there, Happy Vday!