Think about your favorite, lazy morning. Nowhere to go but home, with your people. The coffee (or tea, if you like) is hot, the tunes are on…even in these times of staying home every day (and then rinse, repeat), there’s something about those mornings where you have no plans but to be IN the morning. When you’re a parent, two things happen: 1) a “lazy” morning usually starts when it’s still dark out, and 2) the routines on these lazy mornings change all the time. What happens on a lovely slow morning with your newborn (yes, those mornings do exist!) is so different than what happens with a five-year-old, or your teens.

My dear friend Becca asked me to come by her place for an in-home session on an early morning late last fall to capture an all that delicious slow togetherness. We’d planned for me to come before her little gent Samuel was awake, but on this particular morning, I found the two of them snuggling in his room. This in-home session was pure documentary — I hung out with Becca, her husband John, and Samuel for a couple of hours and photographed them doing their thing together. When we talked about what mattered to her for these photos, it was the simplest things – the early morning snuggles and playtime, the making of the coffee and the green juice, saying grace before the meal. The simplest, loveliest everyday things we’re all blessed to do as families that change so quickly, and that we often take for granted.

With sessions like these it’s easy to get waylaid in the wrong details — what do you even wear when a photographer comes to your house at 7 in the morning? What if the house isn’t the cleanest it’s ever been?

I hear you — I’ve got two kids and I know what my house (and my PJ situation) looks like at that hour. I totally get it.

But that’s the magic of it. When this particular season you are in is over, the mess of all the things won’t matter. What will matter is remembering what it felt like to be there together, in that time, when the bounty of your real everyday life was so evident in just that particular way.

That’s why I loved this session so much — there is an overflowing of love in Becca and John’s house. You can feel it when you’re there and I can feel it when I look back at these frames too. In-home sessions like this always feel like such a gift for me to shoot — to be invited into a family’s sacred space as an invitation to honor a family as they are. Even in the early early.