Diligent Documentation

I kept a lot of the heavy-personal pregnancy stuff off the blog this year because it felt out of place, which is ironic because, you know, I write about my life. In reality, being pregnant was the greatest thing ever, I was completely obsessed with how my body was changing, and was known to over share every detail about it with anyone who asked me. One of the things I documented for our own personal memories was my belly growth, so beginning around week 15, we began taking weekly photos to capture the changes.

Pete captured the classic side profile shots for memory’s sake, and one of our photographer friends even took amazing professional pictures of our family just days before Hattie’s arrival, but my ultimate inspiration was from this beautiful pin, so I diligently captured photos throughout the pregnancy of my belly from my eye-level perspective. I wasn’t organized enough to take the photos with the same camera, in the same lighting, in the same outfit, or at the same location every week, but the fact that I was at the beach for one of my photos (bikini!), in our woods for others, and at parties for… many… makes the whole series a little more memorable for us personally.

Passing it on for your own inspiration, here are some of my favorites:

Once Hattie arrived, I knew I wanted to document her own growth too, and while there are about 1,000,000,000 different-but-all-so-similar ways that people are doing that these days, I decided to keep it simple and use myself as the constant factor in all of the photos, to document her growth in my own arms.

Two weeks in, and I’m mostly happy for having remembered to do them.

In what different ways have you documented change for your own memories?