"Thank You for helping me see myself as a Mom"

As I clean out drawers, rearrange rooms & organize closets in preparation for the arrival of Baby Awesome I've been taking a lot of breaks to look at old pictures I come across. I've found that I have a lot of old pictures that weren't appreciated in their time. These are pictures I might have looked at at the time & thought they were amusing or OK, but not frame worthy & therefore thrown into a box, not to be unearthed until years later. Maybe my smile wasn't perfect, maybe my hair or makeup was messy or maybe I thought I looked fat, but for one reason or another I didn't like the picture enough to cherish it...until now. Maybe the person in the picture is not in my life anymore or maybe I didn't realize how good I actually looked, but for whatever reason these pictures are worth so much more to me now.

I'm reminded of a Thank You note I got from a new mother recently after I did her son's 3 months pictures. In it she told me about her adjustments to life as a new mom & how seeing the pictures I took brought her to tears. She ended the note by saying "Thank You for helping me see myself as a mom". Knowing this is going to be me in just a few short months & the fact that my hormones are raging, I was brought to tears.

I feel like a lot of people are losing sight of why they're having pictures taken in the first place. Maybe your baby didn't smile for his 3 month pictures (hint: 3 month olds don't usually smile much) but that doesn't make your pictures worthless. That moment in time, that will never come again, has been captured. Appreciate it. And if you can't appreciate it now, just know you will appreciate it in the future.

Keep trying to coordinate the perfect outfits & hope for the perfect weather at the perfect location, but just know that even if it's not as you imagined it, you've documented a time in your life that is fleeting.

In the words of Baz Luhrmann:
"Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh nevermind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You’re NOT as fat as you imagine."