American Girl Meets Ukrainian Boy

I begged, pleaded, and implored my hus­band to get this blog going for what seemed like eter­nity. When it went no where, I started harass­ing his poor best friend, Peter, our designer. I love to write though I don’t claim to be fan­tas­tic at it; I just like it. I started writ­ing update emails to friends and fam­ily dur­ing a fam­ily tragedy and it sparked a pas­sion in me. After all of the antic­i­pa­tion wait­ing for the blog to launch — it’s here. It’s finally here in all its glory and…where do I start? Wait! Wait! I don’t know where to begin. How do you choose a first post for your blog? It’s mon­u­men­tal. What is a mon­u­men­tal sub­ject to begin with? As this post is one step towards build­ing the foun­da­tion for our busi­ness, this leads me to believe I must have our first post be about the foun­da­tion of who we are.

Ukrain­ian is the foun­da­tion of who we are. One set of my great grandparent’s were from Ukraine. So when I heard this ran­dom guy down the lunch table in his white T-shirt and long side burns say that he was Ukrain­ian, I went into a frenzy. What!?! A Ukrain­ian? In Chicago? I had to meet him. I had to talk to him. I had to find out what it really meant to be Ukrain­ian. I tried for weeks to talk to him, to inter­view him, but all I ended up doing was stalk­ing him. Every­one in my fam­ily who knew about my Ukrain­ian her­itage had passed away. This Ukrain­ian kid held the key to my past and he wouldn’t give me a sec­ond, a chance, a pass­ing moment to ask a sim­ple ques­tion like, “Can you tell me more about those yummy stuffed cab­bage things we eat for Christ­mas every year?” Not only did he ignore me, insult me, and deny that I was Ukrain­ian, but he said to his room­mate shortly after the first time talk­ing to me, “Did you see that girl? She is crazy! I hope I never have to talk to her again!!” I didn’t get it. What was there not to like about me? I was fun, out­go­ing, maybe a tad bit loud but isn’t that what makes me fun? Yeah, I had braces and was a lit­tle chubby, but that couldn’t pos­si­bly make me less attrac­tive (wink, wink). This guy must have issues, I thought. But I wanted to know about Ukraine so I was per­sis­tent. Even­tu­ally, he gave in.

This whole story does have to do with pho­tog­ra­phy, I promise. I’m get­ting there. As I men­tioned, he caved. (I won’t even tell you how soon he told me that he fell in love with me.) The rela­tion­ship started at our break­fast table, lunch table, din­ner table – he was on my brother floor at Moody Bri­dle Institute…oops..I mean Moody Bible Insti­tute. But the first place he took me to was Bor­ders to show me pho­tog­ra­phy books. My expe­ri­ence with guys impress­ing me in high school didn’t really go past a bas­ket­ball, foot­ball, soc­cer ball — any­thing that had to do with sports. To have a guy open up a book, share with me about light­ing, pos­ing, crop­ping, and how the image spoke to him didn’t take much to get my blood pres­sure ris­ing. Imme­di­ately, I started to think, “Wait a sec­ond, is this Ukrain­ian kid with side burns and a uni­brow actu­ally cute to me? Am I actu­ally enjoy­ing being with him and not just using him to con­nect with my fel­low kins­men?” From that point, we fell in love and with all the break­fast dates, lunch dates, din­ner dates, home­work dates; we didn’t leave much time to peruse through pho­tog­ra­phy books.

Three years later, I came across the blog of Jules Bianchi. I was smit­ten and became a blog stalker. I had never seen such beau­ti­ful wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy. I wanted more but it was as if I needed more. But what attracted me even more about Jules is the fact that she is Ukrain­ian. I found an old post about how she and her fam­ily dec­o­rate Ukrain­ian Easter eggs each year. Again, God used the Ukrain­ian aspect of who we are to weave us and guide us into a new adven­ture. I imme­di­ately passed the blog along to Vitaliy who by this point is my hus­band. And we are right back where we started just like our first date — together, in love, with pho­tog­ra­phy. And now it has taken us past just a ran­dom con­ver­sa­tion, past a hobby, into a dream. It is our dream and our prayer to run our own pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness together — the Amer­i­can and the Ukrain­ian. We have always been dream­ers, but God has enabled us to make many of our dreams a real­ity. This is our hope for Prokopets Stu­dio. We hope you will con­tinue to visit our blog and join us in this adventure.

This is your first intro­duc­tion to who we are. There will be many, many more chances to get to know us and wit­ness our crazy fun lives. We hope to share our pas­sion with you on this blog. Drop us a line in the com­ments sec­tion so we can get to know you also.

Talk to you soon!

~Can­dace Prokopets

The first pic­ture we ever took together shortly after Vitaliy finally started talk­ing to me