Happy Valentine’s Day! This year, I not only get hugs and kisses from the cutest kids ever, I also SOLD MY HOUSE!!! Hooray! I can’t say enough how grateful I am for all of the support I have had from this community and from my wonderful clients over the past 4 years! Thank you so much for all the wonderful memories:). Kansas City, here I come!
And a little Valentine’s Day cuteness from my favorite valentines:). This is our favorite Valentine’s Day tradition!
XOXO!
Sigh. My sweet, darling baby girl turned one yesterday. I cannot believe it was just one year ago that she came into this world–and it’s such a nicer place to be with her in it. More images to come, but I had to quickly post a little taste of how we spent our Sunday (after church, of course).
Because, what’s a birthday without a cake?
And when you make that much of a mess, you have to take a bath;).
Baby girl,
There are still no words for how much I adore you. The joy you bring to each day still surprises me. Thank you for all that you are.
Love, Mom
Ah, Mother’s Day.
I will admit, Mother’s Day (once I became a mother) was a very problematic day for me for many years. It seemed like Mother’s Day brought more messes, more fighting, more tantrums about not wanting to go sing to the mothers with the other kids at church, and then even more tantrums after the singing was missed and the child couldn’t understand why we couldn’t do it all over again now that she’s changed her mind about wanting to sing.
Sigh.
Then I realized that although Mother’s Day is meant to be a day to honor our mothers, as a mother of small children it is really a day to honor your child’s attempts at honoring you. It means possibly eating a breakfast you would never normally eat in a place you would never normally eat it. It means discovering, via a laminated place mat with finger-painted handprints, that you are, in actuality, 74 years old, only look pretty on Thursdays, love shopping at Walmart, are always saying “go to bed!” and that your favorite food is hot dogs. It may mean making meals, doing dishes, and picking up toys while being told nonstop by bright and shiny little faces about how lucky you are that you don’t have to do any work all day.
Once I let go of the idea that my children would all of a sudden, on the second Sunday in May, like everything about each other all of the time, discover a love for putting shoes in the closet and scrubbing dishes, and generally mature overnight, it suddenly got a lot better. I began to remember how lucky I was to have shoes to put away, dishes to scrub and disagreements to solve. Because all of that is motherhood too. And I realized that Mother’s Day was most likely intended for adult children, who were now mothers and fathers themselves and understood, to honor their mothers.
So, to all the mothers in my life who have helped to raise, support, and inspire me, thank you. To my own mom, who probably has more stories than she can count about Mother’s Day messes, fights, and other general disasters, I am sorry. Truly. And to my own children, I love you to absolute pieces. I would not be nearly the woman I am without you and feel so humbled to have the honor of being your mother.
Now, I am going to play the Mother’s Day card and be a little self-indulgent as I share far too many images of my very own favorite little people:
I have a confession to make. Most of the time, 95% of the time, I don’t put much thought into my images of my own kids. For the most part, I just don’t have the time, the energy, or the patience to dream up fantastic shoot ideas for them. I need to be their mom, not their photographer. With five of them and my personality, I need to make lunch and brush teeth and help with homework, not scout locations, choose outfits, and torture them with curling and flat irons. I usually just grab them when there is a free moment and take what I can get. Maybe there will be a time when I can do more. But it’s not that season for me right now.
So when I do get a fantastic idea, it kind of eats at me until I can bring it into reality. In January I came up with this great idea to take Eva out to the same field that Brittany Woodall of Baby as Art used when she was here taking Eva’s newborn portraits–to take her 6 months later when she was 6 months older and it was completely the opposite season. Britt was here at the tail-end of summer, so I needed the tail-end of winter. I needed snow. Now, pretty much any other year, that would not be a problem. Last year, for example, I would have had my choice of a hundred days to go out and shoot. But this year, with absolutely no snow on the ground, I started to despair of ever being able to get these shots. Not only did I need snow, but it also needed to be relatively mild enough to take a tiny baby outside, if even for just a few minutes. I literally prayed for days. I know it seems silly, and I know it’s not really important, but it was important to me. I decided that it didn’t matter when it happened, if it snowed I would go. I would go any day except for Wednesday. Wednesdays we are at gymnastics for 3 hours and with homework and dinner and everything else, Wednesdays are impossible.
Well, the last day of February it snowed. On a Wednesday. Not just any Wednesday. An INSANE Wednesday. I sat there thinking, “There is no way. I cannot make this happen today.” But I couldn’t let it go. What if the snow wasn’t there the next day? I had been given this gift and I had to take it. So, in between making 2 sheet cakes and 3 lasagnas, preschool/elementary school drop-offs and pick-ups, gymnastics craziness, and a million other things, Eva and I squeezed in about 12 minutes outside.
And it was magic.
Poor girl was sick, but miraculously she slept until just before I had the time to go, she ate well, and was pretty entranced by the fluffy white stuff falling from the sky. And everything else just melted away, and it was me and her in that quiet place. And I will be forever grateful.
There was still snow the next day, so I took her out again in our backyard for a few more:).
Magic.
My heart is full.
This is what 10 minutes before church will get you:). Happy Easter!
