It’s Thanksgiving week!
What are you thankful for? My oldest turns THIRTEEN this week, and I am thankful for thirteen years, and all the lessons that thirteen years teach you about parenting. About what you can control and what you can’t. About being kind of amazed and also a little sad/scared/excited that he’s survived to that teenage milestone, and a little curious about what the next thirteen years holds.
Some of you are just friends of the family I’m blogging about, or maybe someone who is pregnant and considering a photographer, and you are wondering where I’m going with this! Apologies for being a little bit stream-of-consciousness here. But I do try to let people understand the vision I am looking at when I pick up my camera, choose a lens, and bring your world into focus. I do bring, unapologetically, my love for my own children, my love for parenthood despite its struggles, authentic and unposed beauty, and a quest to preserve real moments and real emotion.
I am thankful for newborns. I am thankful for a job and a business where I can pursue a passion of mine – preserving the everyday beautiful memory of you, welcoming your new little one into the world. I am thankful to be able to hear a story about longing and longing and waiting and trying and pursuing a ridiculous number of avenues to see if a baby will ever be possible – and then to see that little longed for baby in his parents arms. And I know I’m publishing this moment like a month later, and so mom and dad are I’m sure in the throes of sleep deprivation and how-do-we-figure-this-out and piles of laundry and dishes and… I love to give back moments like this happy warm first week afternoon and show them not just a beautiful portrait of baby bundled up in lovely newborn sweetness (something so many photographers do well – not trying to knock that, just trying to explain my vision, and what you get when you book me as a photographer) – I try to give you back that quiet moment of you, in your rocking chair, on your porch – holding this little, little, newness, who feels like a miracle – because someday I know he will be 13 and arguing with you about the kind of basketball sneakers he needs.
When you walk through the process of waiting and longing for and yearning for a baby, and then he arrives?
With perfect fingers, nose, cheeks.
When you have prepared a home, and nursery, and lined up books and loveys and stuffed animals.
When you love with a kind of love that you didn’t even know was possible.
Then there is something to be thankful for.
