We had been planning this session for about a year. Not that it was so much work to plan, but just trying to decide what part of your everyday life to photograph takes some thought. We had so many fun ideas, but when she got pregnant she knew that she wanted photos of her family with her newborn. I won’t forget the messages we shared after this sweet mom lost her baby a month before she was due to deliver her…. The line that hit me so hard was, “I should have done a maternity session.” This experience and her words made me think about what I was putting off in my own life. There are so many times in my own life where I’m waiting for things to be “just right” to move forward or do what I want to do. It was a strong reminder of how valuable photos are in every stage and season of life. And it reminded me to not wait for the perfect moment, the perfect occasion, or the right circumstances to document my own family. I realized that every moment is the perfect moment and that I need to embrace it for what it is because I will never get that moment back.
And that is what Stephanie did. Even though her session wasn’t what she originally had in mind, she was able to notice how much she loved these warm spring evenings with her girls, planting their garden and reading bedtime stories cuddled up in the hammock in their backyard. It was a perfectly warm evening as the girls dug in the dirt, discovered bugs, and made little plates of leaves and rocks. The girls welcomed their dad home from a long day at work with requests for him to swing them and wrestling. They did their routine games of sliding down the hammock to crash into their mom. They giggled and belly laughed as Stephanie read Junie B. Jones. And I had flashbacks of reading those books to my own daughter who is now too old and too cool. This family had a hard year and they were such an example of embracing the moments they had and they really saw the beauty in the season of life they were in.
