When you are pregnant for the first time, the pregnancy seems to go soooo slow. Then, all the sudden, when the baby is here, life goes by soooo fast! If you’re anything like me, you do a great job taking a million pictures the first two weeks of the baby’s life, and then, you don’t. As moms, we know the importance of documenting our children’s lives, but it’s sometimes easy to get caught up with the busyness of life and before you know it, two weeks, two months go by, and you only have a hand full of pictures. And it only gets worse as your baby gets older, and if you’re a working mom and go back to work.

But Mama, it is so important to document your baby’s life, because before you know it, they’ll be 18. You want to make sure that you have photos that depict your child’s quirks, interests, and talents to reflect on when they are in their college dorm room miles away from you!

You would think that I would be one of the best people at photographing my child’s life. After all, I am a photographer. And not only am I a photographer, I specialize in newborn photography and first year of life! But to be honest with you, the whole second year of my daughter’s life was the WORST job I have ever done! The last good photos I have of my daughter was from her two year portraits, and I’m doing “good” if I get some Iphone photos once a month. It’s so embarrassing how bad I am!

Every year I make a “family yearbook” of our memories from the previous year and when I went to make it for 2018, I was so embarrassed. As I reflected on how I could do better, I decided to make it one of my new year’s resolutions. I have always started off the year with trying to do a photo a day. As great as that sounds though, it’s just too hard for me to do when I am busy with life, a full time teaching job, and a full time photography job. So this year, I am resolving to just do at least a photo and video a week! That’s much more achievable and won’t make me feel like I am failing day after day when I forget or get too busy.

As with all my other goals this year, and my word of the year, I am being intentional. So I made a plan with steps to make sure I would be able to get off on the right step towards doing a better job of documenting my now toddler’s life! I sectioned off the things I want to remember the most. Things that will go a way quickly, things that show her personality, her interests, and talents. This has really helped me stay focused and document the every day things that I don’t want to forget!

I want every mom to feel this success 18 years from now, so I created a FREE Momtog Challenge that you can download here! It’s a simple 5 day challenge that you can do throughout the week to cultivate the habits needed to document the life of your children now and as they continue to grow! I provide tips and tricks to create photos that show the joy and love you feel for your child!

Check out a few of the photos below that I took when trying to document her favorite game to play currently that inspired me to create this challenge for other mamas!

MOMTOG CHALLENGE INSPIRATION

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https://www.instagram.com/meghan_holden/