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Lugging around my “Big Girl Camera” is something I don’t do very often unless i’m using it to shoot a photo session.  For multiple reasons, I am pretty cautious about where I bring it and when I use it.  Besides the size of the camera, I can’t really afford to replace it should it break or should it get lost.  That said, I do feel a little bit guilty sometimes that I own such a nice camera and don’t use it more to take day-to-day pictures of my kids.  When a last minute playdate popped up with some of our favorite friends, I took the opportunity to bring along The Beast and get some lifestyle type snaps of the kids playing.  Noakea, unfortunately, wasn’t with us this morning, so this post is definitely Banyan and Avenlea heavy.

If you have a DSLR camera and don’t know how to use it or are afraid to to bring it along with you, I can’t encourage you enough to learn to use your camera and start carrying it around.  I heard it said once that “the best camera is the one you have with you,” and I couldn’t agree more, but in a world where most of our snaps are on our phones and we rarely print them, I believe that taking the effort to take quality pictures of the day-to-day interactions of our families is well worth the effort.  Pictures like these are the ones i’m going to look back on and be transported back in time by the smiles and faces i’ve captured.  Sometimes I’m worried about being seen as that mom on the playground snapping pictures instead of interacting, but I think it’s possible to do both at the same time.  I don’t take the camera with me very often, but these precious moments frozen in time sure bring me a lot of joy and I know they will for years to come.

 

The swings…..we have one in the backyard, but for some reason, she’d never used one until today.  Fell.  In.  Love.

I’m a sucker for symmetry.

Oh, Banyan.  His looks have spared his life x1000 times, at least.

Avenlea and Callie have a love/hate/love (more love than hate) relationship.  They were feelin the love today <3 <3

Must be first.  All the time.

One of the highlights of the summer for us is attending sailing camp.  We live on a lazy little river that leads out to the Albemarle Sound, and every July the river gets overrun by rascally kid learning how to sail.  There is a lot of boat tipping, a lot of crashing, and a TON of fun!  This is Noakea’s second year participating and we are so thankful for the awesome volunteers who make it possible.  If you ever wondered what it’s like to teach a bunch of 7-16 year olds how to sail, just imagine trying to get a herd of cats to play freeze tag…..its pretty hilarious and a little bit chaotic.  That said, the instructors somehow manage to impart to the kids a love of sailing and it seems to be all they can talk about for weeks to come.  I snapped a handful of shots of the kids toward the end of the day last week, most of them unedited…..just like the kids