A friend on one of the forums that I participate regularly in challenged all of us to document our lives for part of the weekend the weekend.  “Hmmmmm” I thought.  In the class that I teach moms and dads, I stress not missing the moments of life and that it’s all well and good to learn to get off of Auto but you should do whatever you need to to not miss things.  Yeah.  Meet the hypocrite.  I rarely just relax and take pictures of my family.  I always feel that everything has to be perfect.  I full edit each photo.  Even on my personal family blog, the photo doesn’t go up unless it’s edited.  I always shoot in full manual and won’t take a picture if I really hate the outfit they are wearing.  Documenting a day / weekend was much harder in real life than it sounded at first.

But I did it.

Nolan turns five next month.  (!!!!!)  And Layne will be two before I know it.  And I had to make myself realize that sometimes, it’s okay to just shoot.  For the photographers out there, I put my camera on Auto-ISO and Aperture priority and clicked away.  That is as close to auto as I could get.  Yes, I did edit them, but it was just a batch process on all of them at once with my basic workflow action with no tweaking of individual photos.  (Don’t get me wrong.  Some of the ones that I really love I pulled out and fully edited for myself.)  I love them.  I am not IN love with them, but I do love them.  The mommy in me loves them.  The photographer in me kind of cringes to be 100% honest because they are not my 100% best work.  But it’s real.  It’s life.  It’s my weekend.  It’s my family.

(And it should be noted that I did miss a shot – my husband heading out the door in scrubs when he got called in for a c-section conveniently before bedtime – but I did take a photo of his dreaded beeper and cell phone.  😉 )  Also missing is our game of bocce where Layne kept trying to bring back to us all of the balls we were throwing.   And BTW I have absolutely NO idea what Nolan was doing in the center photo of the first collage.  None.