An evening spent digging, chasing, climbing, and – in true kid fashion – ripping flowers out of the ground, roots n’ all. Please join me in supporting the other photographers participating in the Childhood Unplugged movement by clicking here to see all our submissions. You can also follow us on instagram (@childhoodunplugged) and be sure to use…
A portrait of my family once a month in 2016
Good golly miss Molly, talk about waiting for the last minute. Here I am lowering my expectations of myself — having dedicated myself to “a portrait a week in 2015”, which quickly turned into “a portrait a week, most weeks, in 2015″ and ended with “a portrait a week, some weeks, in 2015″ — and still, this go-around giving myself an entire month to snap a pic and here I am just nearly missing the cut off or making the cut off for all those optimists out there. Yes, let’s start this new year off optimistically. I made it! It’s still January, dammit.
Willy: Literally stopped and pulled the car around to show us all the biggest tumbleweed any of us have ever seen. Sometimes the little things really are the big things. No pun intended. But seriously, if you live in Southern California, helllllllllo El Nino.
Hooper: Came home from school and told me he kissed a girl two times (once on the elbow, I might add) and followed it up with, “Mama, I realllllllly like girls”.
Van: Has reestablished the familiar scab between his eyebrows, which happens when he sucks his thumb and uses his adjacent index finger to simultaneously pick at that area. For the record, that means he’s got his thumb in his mouth, his index finger picking that area between his eyebrows, and his other hand on his head, playing with his hair. Hashtag: multitasker.
Me: Have been googling “how many weeks pregnant am I” more and more because I still forget, but also because the countdown, when on my computer screen in terms of days instead of weeks makes it all feel closer. Thirty four days until I reach my due date… never mind the fact I’m destined to go past it.
Jimmie: Remains in these portraits, whether he’s invited or not… The most cooperative member from 2015 starting off 2016 with the same agreeability. Hashtag: he goes where his people go.
There’s a definite let down that comes with telling those closest to you that you’re having another child, a third child.
While the presumably hormonally me wants to hide in a corner and cry, the logical me gets it; I mean everyone jumps for joy when you tell them you’re pregnant with your first. And then when the second comes around, nobody is really too shocked because most people do go on to have more than one child. And I think people place a weird hope that you’ll have one of the opposite sex than what you already have because for whatever reason people think one of each is best. But by the time number three comes along, and presumably any after three, it feels like everyone thinks you’re a bit crazy, a bit over-your-head, or careless in the preventing pregnancy department. People get so excited when you’re pregnant for the first time. No one seems to care when you’re pregnant for the third time.
I think my parents immediately felt the sense that there’d be implications for them. Like when we got Jimmie and their first response was not “what are going to name him” but instead “we’re not going to watch him”. They watch the boys once a week for part of the day and I’m sure they’re trying to wrap their heads around how the scene is going to look (or work, for that matter) with an infant thrown into the mix.
If I could document the faces of both Willy and I’s parent’s faces from finding out about each of our pregnancies, they’d look something like this:
-Hooper: Big eyes, big smiles, lots of confetti
-Van: Big eyes, hands over the mouth as if to say “so soon?!”
-This baby: Straight line to symbolize the mouth, as if to say “I’m too nervous to smile”
For those that have more than two children, was your experience similar? I think as we get closer to the end of this pregnancy and everyone has been given several months of anticipation that excitement, too, has build… but I definitely felt more judgement and less excitement in the beginning. I suppose you can never rule out hormones either… Anyway, curious what other have experienced in this department.
*Images taken back in November by the lovely Tish Carlson
There is an intimacy captured during in-home sessions that simply cannot be captured outside of the home. It’s the reason shooting in-home is my most preferred, favorite setting. Even more, I love to capture the relationship between a mother and her child; it’s unlike any other relationship, so innate and animalistic. The way we care…
The last few months feel like a mission of completion; with the objective being to get things done we’ve talked about doing for some time, all in the name of welcoming another child into our family and home. Downtime on the weekends that we have together have been a productive whirlwind, with several trips to the local hardware store along with trips to drop off donations at the local secondhand stores, not to mention countless loads of laundry and sorting of clothes the boys grew out of long ago. There’s still much to be done, but the dent has been made and with the exception of the daily messes that seem to overtake any house where children reside, things are coming together.
For the bathroom renovations in both our bedroom as well as the bathroom outside of the boys’ room we went with penny tiles on the floor, white subway tile backsplash, custom made vanities using the same reclaimed wood we had left over from our flooring in the garage, and vintage rugs that we’ve scored at some point along the way. Both mirrors are from Ikea and are super reasonably priced. The facet in the boys’ bathroom and the towel hooks are also from Ikea. We went with wall-mounted facets from Lowes in our bathroom and we love them. The hardware on the vanities is also from Lowes.