"the days are long, but the years are short," someone(s) told me about mothering. i’ve found it to be so very true. some days are downright ETERNAL, and as both my children are simultaneously melting down and hanging around my neck, making impossible-to-decipher demands, i catch myself wishing it away. the hardest thing for me about become a mom was (and is), hands down, the loss of personal space and time. it is in that department that motherhood feels most sacrificial for my introverted self. likewise, it is also the centerpoint of much of my daydreaming (ah, it would be so nice to have the day to set up however i choose, engaged in various creative projects, reading novels, journaling and lingering in prayer, running errands alone....)

but my firstborn will be 3 in just about six weeks and those 3 years have flown by. how can it be that this firecracker of a girl is nearly 3?! her baby fat is already melting and her body is getting more proportional like a KID. she’s a kid. i have to face it.

today i’m thinking about this phenomenon -- the short years and long days thing -- in connection with photography. i’m feeling very glad that the photographs i have from these short years built of long days are the kinds of photographs that they are: photojournalistic, storytelling images. i know that i’d be disappointed if i didn’t have those images of disheveled children playing on dirty floors, and if instead all i had were collections of pretty pictures of manicured, stiff kids posing grudgingly in a studio. because the latter would tell me virtually nothing about the personhood of my littles, or the fleeting characteristics of their babyhoods and toddler years. oh, man. i’d be so sad.

i like Smile Sessions and Mini-Sessions... i love them. i love to shoot them, and they yield frame-worthy images, images you can send to grandparents and get rave reviews. but i hope they won’t be all. i hope they won’t serve as the primary documentation of the families i do them for. i hope hope hope that they are either learning how to use a camera in order to do the job of catching all those ordinary, sacred, messy, and fleeting moments and details at home, OR that they will consider letting me (or some other gifted visual storyteller) come into their home every so often to tell those stories.

Family Photojournalism sessions yield storybook-worthy images. which is why these sessions include such book. :)

friends, we only get to do this once. they will only be 2 once, and only for a blink.

well, now that i’ve got that off my chest, here are some of my family’s own cherished photojournalistic style photos from the last year.

first, a Hazel-centric collection...