Happy New Year! We're keeping cool in this Queensland heat by alternating between bunkering down in the air conditioning with craft activities or kids movies, and heading outside in the early morning or late afternoon to sit in the blow up pool or splash at the water table (thanks, Santa!) I hope your Christmas/New Year period has been joy-filled.
As you can imagine, my kids are more often than not my photography subject, be it on film, learning with my newly acquired DSLR (yes, that 'D' is for ... digital!) or a quick snap on the ever present iPhone. I'm so happy they will have piles of photographs of their everyday when they're older, I remember flicking through a box of photographs that my mum kept in a box in the linen cupboard - all of the 'outtakes' that never made it to the albums, but they were always our favourites. Living in digital times means an abundance of photographs of our lives, but they're all living on our phone or hard drives (even my film is scanned and stored digitally as well as the physical negative), forgotten after a few shares on social media and after their place at the front of the camera roll is replaced with newer versions. It's why I'm so dedicated to delivering physical photography products to my clients, but more on that another day.
Following a few parenting and lifestyle blogs, I began to take notice of the 52 Project that a lot of the blog authors were participating in - sharing a portrait of their child, once a week, every week. For me that's an achievable goal, the frequency suits me and I can see the physical product at the end - a book of my children's year complete with musings of little moments that I don't want to forget of them and that I want them to know about.
So, here we go, the first entry of this project, I'm so looking forward to working on this and observing my children with a new awareness.
Santa delivered the kiddies a trampoline for Christmas, it has been a huge hit! We're all outside multiple times a day and the kids are burning off loads of energy. Georgina especially loves it and would spend most of her day out on it, she's content jumping around on it or laying on her back looking up at the sky. And braids, she is all about her hair being braided right now, she has been challenging me with new ways to make four and five braids in her fine fly away hair.
My littlest love in an unusual moment of stillness. He is our tornado of destruction, I am usually on the chase when it comes to photographing him. The frame before this one is him saying 'cheese', the frames that followed were of him sticking stickers on his cheek, he is sticker-obsessed, he sticks them all over the house on any surface and anyone. But this frame, and those eyes and those chubby cheeks, I couldn't go past it.
(Meanwhile, that spot above his limp is a pimple! He is 23 months old and he has his first pimple ...?)
Another rarity, my babes, snuggling together without one trying to squirm away from the other. I'm not sure that I'll include a photo of them together each week for this project, but it might be a happy little addition every now and then.
You can read about how the 52 Project came to be on Jodi's blog Practising Simplicity, and join in if you like. The second part of this memory keeping project has been inspired by a post on Elise's blog about a different spin on documenting her daughter's year. My husband and I always lament "I hope we don't forget how they say this or do that", I'm hoping the 'I want to remember' prompt takes care of all of that.
I'd love to hear more about if you work on memory keeping for your family, and how. Perhaps the 52 Project is something you could begin for yourself?
Renee x