Hi! I want to introduce my little family! My Husband, James Waylon and I ( MEL ) have two girls earth-side, and a beloved son in heaven. I talk often of him and will never stop doing that because he’s so much a part of our lives still.

We live in the Southwest Virginia Mountains, raise chickens, currently have two dogs and a cat named Olive. (great mouse catcher 😉 ) We are trying a new type of gardening this year and instead of the large and overwhelming plot we’ve had for many years, we tore out our rotting patio, put down stone and built some garden bed tables! We now have a wonderful space to grill, raise fresh food and spend time together. A bonus is that I got an update to my office view!! You can check it out here! https://www.instagram.com/reel/CezCH4VlAlG/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Back to our family! If you’ve ever been on my social media’s you may have noticed that we don’t post the faces of our girls. Why not? Why would a photographer not post her own children’s faces? Well the simple answer is, safety and privacy. The long answer is having a reason for both. But also just becoming more educated on web safety for our children. I used to share EVERYTHING. The bad, good, ugly truths of our life. I thought i ‘had’ to, for my previous ‘job’. After a time, it no longer resonated, I started questioning it, I apologized to my family for it, (mainly my husband as our oldest was still young.) and I started learning more about respectfully sharing our lives. In 10 years, would my daughter be okay knowing I shared that about her? Would I be okay, if someone shared MY bad days? No! Gosh I’d be embarrassed and angry they did!! So maybe I didn’t need to post it in order to build an ‘authentic’ reputation. Maybe I could just let us be us, with some privacy….

So that’s what I did. Just like we love our farmland hometown, our long driveway and not having noisy neighbors, ( side-note: we are the noisy neighbors with our kids lol sorry y’all. ) we like our web privacy too. This will be the main place to keep updated with what we have going on. What a TREAT for you all! LOL. I truly hope you hang around, whether it’s for the our family stories, or because you love the photos and creative posts. Welcome to the HR+L Fam.

Blessings. – Mel, James, V, and N.