I don’t have anything entirely profound to say here, to be honest. Maybe that’s a bad way to hook you into reading the rest of this post (?) but it’s the most honest thing I can say. We all carry a tiny tool in our pockets (ahem, it’s a phone) to document our days if we choose to, and we most definitely all have experienced what it’s like to spend our days wound tight, distracted, and busy.

This is the beef: just slow down and take the picture.

Don’t overthink it.

Observe what your children are doing. Observe their imaginations, their joy, even their sadness and big emotions. Observe the way they treat nature with intrinsic curiosity. Observe the way they don’t mind if bubbles stick to their freshly clean head or mud squishes up right up between their toes.

Take a deep breath. And snap the photo. And then join in.

It doesn’t have to be gallery-level work. It just has to be true work.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been LOVING Joy Prouty’s new book Practicing Presence (trust me, you’ll want to go add it to your Amazon cart right now!), and it’s re-inspired me in every way to be more present in the way I interact with my girls as well as document them.

It’s one thing to document for families who are paying me to pay attention to their unique beauty, it’s another to pay attention to my own family’s unique beauty when the sink is full of dishes, and I can’t find the other matching sock, and the noise of blocks banging on the living room floor becomes too loud.

I HAVE to slow down. I have to choose presence. I have to because it’s a lifeline for me on the hard days, a record on the good days, and a chest of new, exciting treasure to be held and behold on every day in between.

Motherhood is better experienced presently, trust me.

Here’s a look at the ways I’ve been practicing presence through quick snaps of my camera – no overthinking, just delighting.