My Peace, Love and Happiness

One of my kiddos’ favorite times of the year is the day we get to have our family pictures made. I know that there are a lot of kids that don’t like this at all so I am super grateful that mine enjoy it so much. I think the reason is that we make it super fun. I start about 3 weeks ahead of time letting them know that they need to decide what they want to wear; we pin ideas to Pinterest and make little plans. Then we might do a little shopping; things like that, just to let their minds wrap around the ideas. I always let them pick what they are going wear because I want them to be themselves, that is the most important part for me. Once the day arrives, we get so excited, and generally we do the shoot outside; I pick a spot that they are familiar with, this year we picked a local park. The best advice I have is to just play, let your photographer know the shots that you want and then let him or her capture those, but in the end, just play and let the day unfold. Each year I am so taken back the beauty in my children’s eyes when I get the photos back from our photographer and each year I am so grateful for the investment I made to capture this fleeting moment in time.

Here are three of the ideas we captured – feel free to use them for your photo this year!

• We did Peace, Love & Happiness with our hands.
• I had both kiddos kiss me on the cheek.
• We also did the “stack”.

Thank you to Sheryl Braun for capturing our lives!