I’m sooo late in posting her final monthly baby update, partly because this little girl chose a birthday during my busy season at work (the nerve, ha!), but mostly because I feel so much self-imposed pressure to capture every last detail of her babyhood before her first birthday. But I’m glad I had a little extra time to process this month, because it’s been huge. As I’m writing this several weeks later, I’m realizing that she’s still (and will always be) my baby. She still snuggles the same, makes me laugh just as much as ever, and has so many innocent, sweet little quirks that ..read more

  I can’t believe I only have one more of these posts to write, and by then it will be her first birthday!!! When I was pregnant, I remember holding the bag of wooden discs for her monthly photos and not being able to fathom having a 10, 11, 12-month old next year. Now here she is! We’ve both been through so much change and growth in such a short amount of time! I’m feeling a bit nostalgic and sad that her first year is coming to a close, but mostly I’m excited because she’s getting more fun and interactive all the time. This has been a month full of learning new words!  She doesn’t ..read more

  We’re in double-digit territory! Clara is ten months old!! This month felt so full of changes that it’s hard to include them all in one blog post, but I will give it my best shot.   This was a huge month for her physical milestones: • After a couple months of army crawling, something clicked and she started crawling regularly one day after turning 9 months! It’s been so entertaining watching her explore on her own terms. • Once she mastered crawling, she also figured out how to sit herself up. We walked in to find herself sitting in her crib one morning…that was a surprise!  ..read more

Proof that I still take pictures of people other than my daughter It’s been wild to jump back into photographing families professionally again. In some ways the job feels exactly the same as my last pre-COVID sessions in March 2020 (the pace is still a million miles a minute while I’m chasing toddlers), but in other ways everything has changed. I’ve always had the heart of a mom, but now I have a bit of experience as one too. I know firsthand how much planning and hope can go into getting *just one* photo where you actually managed to blow-dry your hair and the kids aren’t squirming out of yo ..read more

  Oh man! Between being back to work, Clara getting more mobile, and hosting lots of visitors, these posts are getting harder and harder to keep up with! I’m so grateful to have the monthly deadline as accountability to keep up with personal photos, otherwise I would be buried in a mountain of RAW files with no hope of catching up before she leaves for college. Yikes! Here are the big updates from this month: Clara met her Abuelos for the very first time!!!! We had been trying to coordinate their visit for many months, and it was such a gift to welcome E’s parents to Boston. We had a wo ..read more

  Fair warning that this is a loooong post…SO many changes to share from this month! I’m grateful for these posts to keep me accountable, or else I would be buried in unedited personal photos right now. I keep taking more pictures every month as her personality grows, and my hard drive is becoming stuffed to the brim! I am loving this age so much!!! She is just a delight right now…I wish I could freeze time right here. I love the weight of her curled up in my arms, her heavenly soft baby skin, her big old belly full of milk, her tiny breaths against my cheek. Her sweet, innocent smiles a ..read more

Ooof…Clara is almost eight months old and I’m just now getting around to posting her seven-month update! This month I’ve been working hard behind the scenes to get my business re-opened, so my spare time has gone into that instead of finishing this post. I still have tons of photos to share though! Here’s the news from her seventh month: Clara has turned into a baby on the MOVE! She is not crawling yet, but she’s very close….she pivots around in circles, rolls to grab objects that she wants, and manages to wiggle her way into very surprising spots. One day I left her on her back on the diape ..read more

  I say this every month, but this month I especially mean it — HOW are we here already?! How do we have a six-month-old? It seems like we just brought her home from the hospital, but we’re already halfway through her first year. The night before her “half birthday” I teared up as I laid her down in her crib and said goodnight. When we hit big milestones, sometimes it feels like the baby days that I’ve dreamed of for so long are slipping through my fingers too quickly. It’s like Clara read my mind that night, because she grabbed my hand with her little chubby fingers and smiled up at me ..read more

  Clara’s fifth month has been an absolute rollercoaster, and while it has had many rewarding and heartwarming parts, it has also been our most challenging month of parenthood so far – mostly because of the four-month sleep regression. When I wrote her four-month post, we had just entered the regression and it wasn’t terrible yet. After a few weeks of bad nights, I kept hoping things would naturally improve on their own, but her sleep just kept getting worse over the next couple of weeks and she was consistently awake and fussing/stirring between 4-6 a.m. every day (as well as multi ..read more

SO much has happened during Clara’s fourth month! I absolutely love being her mama and sometimes I still can’t believe we don’t have to give her back – she’s all ours! Our baby definitely isn’t a newborn anymore – she’s developing her personality and learning new skills constantly. Her growth feels supercharged this month! Sometimes when I see her for the first time in the morning, she looks like she grew visibly overnight. When I start to get sad that she’s not tiny anymore, she cheers me right up by doing something adorable and amazes me with her fun developments. E and I feel like we ..read more