Oh Baby, Atlanta family photographer

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“I Have Never Loved Someone”

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Oh the love of a baby, of mutual adoration, of an intimate shared experience. There is nothing quite like it. It’s euphoric.

I always feel like a fourth wheel during newborn and baby sessions, and I’m happy to be along for the ride. There’s no need to pose or prompt anyone because they are going to do all the cute and loving things anyways. We just sit in the here and now and respond to what the baby needs. They are the perfect teachers of how to exist in the present, the ultimate practitioners of mindfulness, and it is a joy to be with them.

Long past are the baby days in my house, and every time I get to photograph these beginnings of family growth, I return to my own home with a little more nostalgia and lovingkindness and presence towards my much bigger kids—grateful for the perspective of these moments.

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Finding beauty and joy in your daily rituals and routines, Atlanta family photographer

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“To love your days is to love your life.”

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I’m always inspired by the ideas of James Clear (if you aren’t subscribed to his 3-2-1 newsletter you should be). When I came across what he had to say here (the last part especially), it resonated with why I feel so strongly about photographing the lives of families the way I do.

"Many people view their habits and routines as obstacles or, at the very least, obligations to get through. Making the morning coffee, driving your kids to the next activity, preparing the next meal-we often see our routines as chores to be completed.

But these are not moments to be dismissed. They are life. Making coffee can be a peaceful ritual-perhaps even a fulfilling one-if done with care rather than rushed to completion. It's about the amount of attention you devote to these simple moments, and whether you choose to appreciate them or bulldoze through them on the way to the next task.

Find the beauty and joy in your daily rituals and you will find beauty and joy in your daily life. To love your habits is to love your days, and to love your days is to love your life." - James Clear

Life with young kids can feel like it’s just work…all the time. When your days are a string of routines that lead you to bedtime with little time left for anything extra, it can feel really exhausting. It IS really exhausting. Maybe, if we can see that string of routines as being the point of it all—rather than a thing to get through so you can get on with other things—we will be able to see and feel more ease in our days.

And if your family is anything like my family, your routines still may not feel ease-y even with a mindset shift. But I promise, if you can have someone show you what it looks like, you will see that there is still beauty and joy in the way you tend to your family during those routines. I hope that by seeing your days you will come to love your days and in turn love your life. Cause even when the days feel messy and chaotic, there are opportunities for tender moments of connection within the daily routine.

Thanks to this family for reminding me to find the joy in shared rituals.

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5 Years Ago, Reflecting on the Pandemic, Atlanta Family Photographer

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 5 years since I was watching Frozen 2 while refreshing the news of the pandemic. Every time I hear the song, “All is Found,” I’m still reminded of that feeling in my gut when I started to realize this virus would affect our lives in significant ways. Honestly, it’s not unlike the uncertainty I feel from my current news refreshes. (“Is this really happening?”)

I took a lot of photos during the pandemic. I shared a photo story about my pandemic experience here, but I wanted to share more from my archive of that time. I don’t want to forget the toilet paper shortage or how we tried to keep each other safe with garbage bag hugs and homemade masks.

During the extended social distancing period, we spent a whole lot of time outside, chopping wood, clearing out our little Secret Garden, sunning on the deck. We celebrated birthdays and holidays outside. We played card games outside.

We navigated how to do school from home for the rest of the school year, and then I dusted off my teacher’s hat and hosted a pandemic pod for the following school year. You can see images of that experience here.

We traded tickets to Greece for old-fashioned feet-in-the-air airplane rides. We traveled up and down our street. We explored the parts of our yard that got buried when they decided to pave a giant highway back there 70 years ago. We toured our favorite neighborhood spots and discovered some new ones.

We had lots of time at home to lean into behavior challenges. At the time, I thought the challenges we were having were all my fault. I thought that I must be getting my parenting wrong because the effort I was putting in was not producing the outcomes I expected…it would be a few more years before we would start collecting the acronyms to help frame our experience…PANDAS/PANS, ADHD, ODD, Anxiety, Dyslexia…to name a few. I’m sure I’ll share more about all of that some time too.

I know everyone’s pandemic experience was different, and it’s not lost on me that we are fortunate to be able to look back on this time with relative fondness.

We got the time to be together. We had work. We made it work.

We got covid at some point. We got better.

We languished. We lived.