Family photos

I really should call our friend and photographer, Amy Wilbanks, to set up a family photo shoot. It's been almost three years since our last...? When your baby is five and a half, that's too long. I know, they are *just* photographs. "Omg, we are totes overdue for our professional family photo shoot" is very first world problems of me. Yet the sessions we've done are so dear to me. Once, the last one actually, was a day in the life theme, and Amy got pictures of us making tea and gathering chicken eggs. They look like images fit for a magazine feature, and they perfectly capture how I saw our family at the time, and how I will always remember those homeschooling, urban homestead years (that will never be realized in the same way again.)

 

 

That is some precious shit right there. I am person who moves from day to day and time to time, shedding my past and not curating a future: the present is where I live. I will never be the family member who in old age can recite memory after memory and accurately recall who was there and how it went down. I can barely remember how breakfast went down. And all of those experiences, especially each phase of our family life has shaped me--shaped me deeply--but I am one who will want to look back, I'll need help looking and as someone who responds so deeply to beauty, the more beautiful the image the more emotional access I have to the times it captures.