Glass Eye Video Blog: The blog for wedding videography. Wedding and event video production company based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

….When I started my internship at the television station and ultimately met the person that would become my wife. Crazy how time flies! Stop me if you’ve heard this one before but Reagan and I actually met at the station where she was in marketing and I was just a wee intern. We found out very early that we went to the same high school, graduated a year apart from each other. Grew up within a mile or two of each other and heck, our dads even went to high school together. This was the summer of 2002 and we’ve been together ever since! Six years later, we’ve been married four of them, brought the most beautiful child into the world, yeah that’s right, she’s the most beautiful child in the entire world! I have the certificate to prove it! So today is our four year anniversary and Reagan is the best wife anyone could ever ask for and yes I have a certificate to prove that too! She helps keep me grounded when I need it most and she’s the first one there to pick me up when I need a boost. I wouldn’t change a thing and I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Not only is she incredibly beautiful, she’s also incredibly smart and a great mother! What more could a guy ask for! Oh yeah, Reagan……..I kinda broke the glass of the frame getting this picture out. Sorry! Photo credit goes to Nicole C. Photography!

So I’m setting up for a love story shoot the other day and Mya walks in the room and discovers something new and intriguing…my camera! She walks over to it and starts to pan and tilt and being the cool dad that I am, and I am cool, I grab the home camera and snap this pic…

The look on her face is priceless! So while I’ve got your attention on Mya, I might as well give you an update! She is now a full time walker/runner. Her favorite foods are chicken nuggets and hot dogs, and she’s a huge fan of yogurt smoothies! She’s learning more and more words and one of her favorites is ‘no’ and when she says it, she drags it out like in the picture above. We read a book to her in which Barney is asking what sound x animal makes and she is so stinkin’ cute when she makes the animal sounds! She had her first trip to KIngs Island not too long ago, we rode a ride together at the local church festival and she has a shiny new wagon in the garage that she likes to get pulled around in like royalty. I’m doing my best to cherish these moment, but its incredible how the days have turned to weeks and weeks to months, and now somehow over a year has gone by. I love you Mya!

One of my favorite things to do in the summer is go to concerts. There’s just something different about watching your favorite band perform outside in the open air, the mood is completely different than in an arena. Last night was a night I had been looking forward to for a while, not only because it was a night off, but because I got to see one of my all time favorite bands, Blues Traveler, perform at Turfway Park. They were on tour with Live and Collective Soul. Now, I also really like Live who headlined, but I actually went to see BT, who completely blew me away. Seriously, if you’re not super familiar with them, I HIGHLY recommend their 1991 release, “Travelers and Theives”. John Popper can wail on the harmonica as if he were born with one in his hands. They did an INCREDIBLE cover of the Charlie Daniles Band classic, ‘The devil went down to Georgia’ and Popper completely nailed the fiddle parts on his harmonica. It was a moment my friend and I will be talking about for a while. Live then came on and blew the crowd away and really put on a great show, the energy was phenomenal! So anyway, it was a great night filled with some incredible songs by a couple of my favorite bands and I was able to get away from editing, at least for a couple hours!

So man’s best friend turns another year old today, he’s four years old now! To be completely honest, we’re not sure what his exact birthday is, we just celebrate it on the 4th of July. Reagan and I made that fateful trip to the SPCA one day in May 2005 and I remember seeing him for the first time and saying ‘he’s the one’! I think Reagan had something smaller in mind, but an hour later and he was getting his first car ride of many with us. I can remember bringing him home and finding out just how smart that guy really is! He already knew some obedience and a few tricks as well, but I think he was also badly abused before. We had to really, really work with him to get him to where he is today. He’s a completely changed boy and the best dog I could’ve ever asked for. He’s great with Mya and they like to play together quite a bit and he even knows to sit by her in her high chair because he knows she’ll eventually drop something! He’s got it good now, and by good I mean he’s completely spoiled. Everywhere I go, he goes and he knows that every morning he’s going for a car ride as we drop Mya off at the sitter’s or grandma’s. The guy is a Frosty Paw junkie, and knows that when we grill out, he gets his own steak too. He knows what dog park means and gets all hyped up when those words are mentioned and flips out the whole ride there! He’s extremely loyal and lays by my feet all day as I edit away! So anyway, we went to the SPCA to get a dog and wound up leaving with a horse that became my best friend! Here are a few pics of him!

Here he his protecting this ratty beaver puppet thing that he completely shreds and carries around the house!

He has a fascination with sitting on the stairs

This gives a good idea on how BIG he really is!

So yesterday being Father’s Day I thought I’d get you up to speed with what Mya is doing. After all, she is the one that makes it possible for me to celebrate this holiday! She’s just over 13 months now! New words are finding their way into her vocabulary, she is now taking more and more steps by herself, and she’s now a certified daddy’s girl. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but she is definitely a daddy’s girl. Maybe she really means it when she looks up at me with her arms outstretched and lets out a little cry or maybe she’s far more advanced and she’s workin’ ol’ dad over in hopes for that new car when she turns 16. I guess I’ll never know the answer to that one, but I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the ride! She’s experiencing new firsts every single day and testing the boundaries of her independence. No longer does she want to be fed, no no! She’s insisting on feeding herself whether its a peach, a banana, a pancake or even yesterday’s snow cone. Forget the Gerber stages, she’s moved on to the real deal! So anyway I thought I’d share a few pictures with you, including this first one which probably is my favorite. This one goes back to the beginning and was taken at the hospital just two days after she was born!

Here she is showing off her new ability of standing and drinking at the same time!

And here she is in her new swimming pool!

So as you know, Mya just turned one year old on Tuesday and of course we threw her a party, Sesame Street style! And of course there were an insane amount of pictures and video taken that day, but nothing compares to what happened yesterday when Kortnee Miller of Simply Timeless Photography unleashed her creative genius on the streets of downtown Cincinnati. Picture this, its about one in the afternoon, the Reds are in town, the sidewalks are are being abused by business suits, high heels, and….. a baby in a sleeper???

You continue on your journey, turn into your favorite coffee shop and find someone sitting in your favorite chair…

Working it old hollywood style

I love my daddy time

And then you find this…

Many, many, many thanks to Kortnee for the incredible ideas, and the even better photos. Also a big thank you has to go out to the kind and very talented folks at Busken Bakery, especially Dan Busken for the incredible and at this point inedible cake. Dan, I’ll see you at your wedding!

To say this has been the best year of my life would be the greatest understatement ever said. Daddy’s little girl is growing up FAST! She’s a year old now, ok, her official birthday isn’t until tomorrow, but we celebrated it this past Saturday surrounded by friends and family. In this past year, she’s grown by leaps and bounds and has never ceased to amaze me along the way. Reagan and I watched her crawl, get her first teeth, say her first words, climb up on things, stand on her own, chase after Guinness, wave bye-bye, splash water in the tub, climb the stairs, take her first steps and fill the room with her infectious laugh. I honestly never knew I could ever love someone as much as I love her and it’s such a blessing to watch her grow and take on her own personality. I AM the luckiest man on earth. I’m a big softy too. I well up with tears quite often when I see her doing something new. I know these are the moments I’ll look back on years from now and smile, and laugh, and yeah, I’ll probably even cry too. I put a little video together of her first year and shamefully I couldn’t devote as much time as I wanted to on it, but I’m still very happy with it. Even this was hard for me to create. I couldn’t stop crying as I’m editing it. Looking back at all the footage of her as a newborn and those special little moments that Reagan and I will never forget. We showed this at her party and everyone loved it and I wanted to share it with you. Please enjoy!

Stop growing! Its going by waaaaayyy too fast. It truly is amazing how quickly she has grown, and yet she’s only nine and a half months old. As a new parent I get so excited to see her discover new things and explore her surroundings. She’s crawling now, she’s now on Gerber stage 3 and her top teeth are coming in. She seems to have a fascination with the laundry room, which is right off the great room in our house. Not exactly sure what’s so exciting to her in there, but it is definitely one of her favorite rooms in the house.

She’s also discovered the stairs, yikes! She loves to bother Guinness when he’s sleeping, she’ll crawl all over him and he just raises up, licks her a few times and goes back to sleep. The other day she was playing with his bean bag elephant toy, which he never plays with, he saw this and gently took it from her hands and took it across the room and laid by it. She has also found out that when she slaps her hand in the bathtub, water splashes and she really gets a good laugh out of it. Its things like these that really make me tear up a little when I look at her learn, laugh, and play. Its the greatest joy in my life to see her discover and to know that the best is yet to come. Yep, we’re going to have a lot of fun, Mya, Reagan, Guinness and I. Family vacations, birthday parties, the holidays, all of it seems to mean a whole lot more to me! So, here are a few pictures we took of her just the other day!

UPDATE! She has started pulling herself up on furniture and taking small cautious steps one at a time. Just last night she said “ma ma”, those were her first words. Looks like “dada” will have to take second place!

What an incredible week it was last week! I got to work with Will Ferrell and I got the news that my commercial was going to air on television! On my way up to Columbus on Wednesday I get a call from 94.9 The Sound, telling me that although I didn’t win the Spread the Sound contest, they still wanted to air the commercial I produced! I almost couldn’t believe my ears! Ok, so the five grand would’ve been a good chunk of change to put away for Mya, I’m still super excited that my commercial is going to be seen by thousands of people! And what a small world it it, the person that called me recognized me as her teacher at the Ohio Center for Broadcasting! So, anyway here’s the spot again in case you didn’t see it in my previous post!

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So I was contacted a couple months ago to produce promotional videos for Will Ferrell’s new movie Semi-Pro! The production was scheduled for yesterday and I made the drive up to Columbus with a good friend of mine where we spent a few hours with Will himself. He was doing a small tour around the country to promote this new movie and funnyordie.com. What an incredible honor it was to be selected for this amazing opportunity. Will was great to work with, he helped everything go so smoothly. He was so incredibly nice and super funny. There were times where I really wanted to laugh out loud but had to keep it inside because we were recording. After the interviews were over, Will and the rest of the gang from funnyordie.com put on a stand up comedy show in front of 15,000 people at the ValueCity Arena on OSU’s campus. Will came out first and wore a Michigan sweatshirt, which of course got the crowd all fired up, then ripped it off to reveal an OSU shirt underneath. He then went into a pseudo ninja scene where he battled ninjas as they came from off stage. The crowd went nuts and the comedy continued for a few hours. Without a doubt, one of the highlights of my career took place yesterday. Will was kind enough to give a special birthday greeting to Mya, my daughter, who turned nine months old yesterday!