The past 2 weeks have brought me a lot of newborn babies. It seems to be what I am shooting most this month and I love it. Newborns sessions are one of my absolute favorites. It just never ceases to amaze me that we start out so small and so helpless. I also love watching my clients navigate their way through those first few weeks of a first baby. In watching them move through the big changes, it helps me remember it too, and I do, pretty vividly. I remember being too scared to cut their fingernails and taking forever trying to dress them without making them mad. I remember the bleary eyed feeling of not enough sleep and too many questions. How hard it was trying to figure out how much to let them cry, when to step in and how much they should be sleeping, eating or pooping. I read every book I could find searching for the feeling of competency that only comes with time and doing. Then just as soon as you think you have it figured out they go and change it up and start doing something new. It definitely keeps you on your toes.

One of the best pieces of advice that I ever got was not to get too wound up about any one thing because as soon as you get that one figured out, it will change on you again. That advice helped me through some tough times because it proved true, time and time again. Now my babies are no longer little babies and starting to become big boys. In fact, Finnian will be 5 in a few weeks. You might think that, once they get a little older, you stop worrying about sleeping, eating and even pooping but it doesn't work that way. In fact, I woke up at 4:45 this morning to Finnian crawling into my bed.

The worries never go away but instead they ramp up and become about things like worrying about learning, school, testing, friends and fitting in. It's so much harder when their little hearts on the line. Sayer came to me just yesterday and told me about someone at school who had hurt his feelings. That's hard stuff because you can't just fix it with a diaper change, a call to the pediatrician or a fresh bottle. I guess it's not quite accurate to call one harder than another because it's all relative and "hard" never stops but, like the advice I received back then, just changes from one thing to another.

All I can offer from my vantage point (almost 7 years into it and a long way to go) is to breathe it all in and really try to be in the moment. 5 (6,7,8...) pounds only lasts for so long. You'll turn around and the next thing you know they're walking, and then running and then...

Happy Love Thursday friends, go grab your babies and hold them close!