DOCUMENTING OUR DAYS

This blog, Babies and Beauty began over four years ago now, though under a total different name it initially started as a way to document a pregnancy. A pretty boring textbook pregnancy if I'm honest. I remember reading the beginnings of blogs like Lucies and Roms and feeling inspired and intrigued by other peoples pregnancy updates, I knew nobody in my life who was expecting and so it felt nice to relate to other women online - thus Babies and Beauty began. Quite quickly after it all started, Noah entered the world and I suddenly realised what a fantastic space my blog actually was. Within months I began to look back and feel grateful for capturing those moments that might have otherwise be gone forever.

Like most bloggers, I've had my moments when I've wondered if it's worth the upkeep, but it never takes me long to come back to the reason I started and the hundreds of times I've been thankful that I did. Whenever I need to take a break, I do, like during my pregnancy with Patrick when HG really struck me down - it was a very hard time and blogging just wasn't on the agenda when I could barely lift my head out of bed.  I took my time and focused on getting better, which when I did, blogging came back into my life again. Since then it has been pretty full on, I've documented so much of our lives, the good, the bad and the very very ugly but it feels natural and I'm quite content with the direction we're going in. Blogging pushes me to do things that honestly, I probably wouldn't do otherwise. I can without a doubt say that I have photographs from every single week of my sons lives, that's a ridiculously huge amount and though John might roll his eyes when he has to manage the storage on my phone because I've taken another 1000 photographs in the space of three weeks - it's so worth it. I can look back every single week and compare my boys to 'this time last year' or 'this time six months ago', it's amazing and something I really wish had been around during our childhood.

Social media has pushed me in the same way, I share every single day and though it probably bores some, it's such a beautiful way of family and friends to stay caught up with what we're all doing. We have family stretched across Europe, so when my grandparents in Spain are able to see what we got up to on the weekend, and read about what toys the boys love or how Noahs preparing for school and Patrick's started to really talk - it's wonderful, they suddenly don't feel so far away and I really do have my blog to thank for that. I love taking photos, I'm no budding photographer by any stretch of the imagination but I do enjoy snapping away, a picture can give you a distorted reality which is some circumstances is actually quite nice. For example, our recent pumpkin picking escapades, we actually visited two farms and whilst the first was lovely the second wasn't quite as great. We had the whole place to ourselves, fantastic for photographs of which I did capture some beautiful images, but it was so overgrown that it turned into a bit of a nightmare. Patrick couldn't wander around as I'd imagined, as he would trip over long vines and weeds, nettles loitered in between the pumpkins so much so that I don't know how we all managed to avoid a sting. Quite a lot of the pumpkins were rotten which deterred Noah from getting stuck in as a couple of times his hand actually did get 'stuck in', stuck in a rotting pumpkin. Not pleasant for a three year old. All in all a little bit of a drama, we didn't stay for too long and I bought just one pumpkin out of sheer guilt for the desolate farm. BUT, my photos don't tell that story, in a year or so down the line I'll have forgotten all of the negatives because my photographs don't portray that image, they show brotherly love, a beautiful pumpkin patch and lots of autumnal moments. Something I'll probably be so convinced happened, that we'll end up enduring it again next year.