baby bump #3 {full term!}

Here it comes...ready or not. Baby number three! From what I've heard, we're about to have our world rocked.

I've noticed the things people say to me when they hear we're expecting our third child so close to the first two can sometimes be less than encouraging. It's usually something along the lines of "You'll never leave the house again!," "Three kids takes parenting to a whole different level," "Three was really hard for us,"  "Get ready to be outnumbered!," "You've definitely got your hands full!," or "Oh wow, good luck." I understand why anyone might think like that, because I'm pretty sure I think those things every day all on my own. But wow, hearing it said out loud has a way of making it worse!

One thing I keep hearing that I cling to is people mentioning their third baby being their best baby, or if they were a third child (which I was), remembering that they were their mom's best baby. Crossing. My. Fingers. Let this baby be an angel!!

But something even better has stood out to me above everything else. Shortly after we first announced the pregnancy to everyone, I received an email from one of Jon's sweet aunts, congratulating us and saying exactly what I needed to hear. Here is my favorite part:

"May I just say, I fell in love with motherhood at baby number 3. All of a sudden, I was no longer trying to fit two little people into my life—they WERE my life! And I loved it! Babies number 1 and 2 had each other, and I got to love and enjoy baby number 3 like I had not been able to before."

When I read her kind words of excitement and encouragement, I felt like my fears and worries let out a big internal sigh of relief, and I was reminded what a wonderful thing this is. A growing family, another little life, another beautiful blessing...our third child.

I don't doubt what everyone else says. We are about to have our world rocked. This is probably taking parenting to whole new level. It will be really hard sometimes. Our hands will be completely full. It may take us a LONG TIME to leave the house again. And we will need all the luck we can get. But at the same time, we are being blessed with the opportunity for these little people—all three of them—to BE our life (not just be squeezed into it). And to love it.

Before we welcome this new little life into our family, Jon was awesome enough to know I would want a photoshoot to document our little family now, and that's exactly what he gave me for our anniversary/Mother's Day (which, by the way, were one day apart this year). Turns out a photoshoot of two kids plus a maternity session is no easy feat, and we spent most of the time chasing our wild children around (and let me tell you, they are FAST. And fearless. And they think it's funny.). But you'd never know, because Jon caught everything on camera perfectly! I love how they turned out!! And you can probably tell, because there are a lot...

Here are the end results. A 3.5 year old, a 22-month old, a babe in utero, and a mother of 2.5. (These were taken less than 2 weeks ago, when I was 37 weeks pregnant).

Babes 1 and 2. Van has been obsessed with his Superman costume lately, and we pretty much love it. If he wants to wear it, we are happy to oblige every time! Even if it's on the way to our photoshoot. :)


Fly Super-van!


1. 2. 3. 












Watching airplanes in the sky.


Our kids have dance moves that you should probably be jealous of. Just sayin'.












Love that face of hers!


This lasted 2 seconds, but Jon snagged it!


Baby bump lovin'.




What most of the photo session really looked like. 


This kid can't get enough of jumping and flying.






I love how this captures a hint of the wildness in their eyes. :) This is SO our kids.




Love these two crazy kids!!

easter (without the bunny)

Jon and I hesitate in doing outrageous things for our kids for holidays and birthdays, mostly since they're not old enough to care that much or to remember any fabulous plans we come up with. We get somewhat stuck trying to find a balance between over-the-top gift giving and nothing at all (which seems lest wasteful to us), hoping to come up with something tasteful, simple, and meaningful, but feeling like that takes a lot of creativity and effort that we haven't struck into just yet. (If you have any tips, we'd love to hear them!) So some things may or may not go somewhat uncelebrated in the Smith home—at least compared to what we imagine many other families doing.

Easter this year was one of those. We did try to teach Van about to real meaning of Easter, and ended up kind of getting ourselves into a mess trying to explain death and realizing that to our 3-year-old, life and death all sounds like a very casual thing with no emotional implications whatsoever. So if our son happens to say anything insensitive to you regarding death or dying, we apologize in advance. We're working on that concept. :)

But when it comes to the Easter bunny and baskets and treasures, our children are virtually clueless. Our non-religious Easter celebration consisted of attending the ward Easter egg hunt on Saturday morning...and that's it. They loved it, and I saw this as no problem for now since our kids are still so little, until Sunday at church when I was dropping off Van in Primary. As Van got to his chair, one of the older kids sitting behind him (a kid Van idolizes, of course), asked Van what he got from the Easter bunny. You can imagine my embarrassment when poor Van didn't say a word and looked at me in confusion, with eyes begging me to explain what his friend was talking about. I tried to cover for Van by saying yes, he got Easter eggs with candy in his basket, but the older child called my bluff and said, "You mean just from the church party yesterday?" I must not have been very convincing, because in my attempts to make it sound like everyone else's Easter morning, the child questioned again, "Well did he get anything from the Easter bunny? Did he? Did he?!?!" Poor Van never said a word, and I learned that it seems we'll have to act on our plans to find a healthy compromise between normal holiday traditions and what we feel is appropriate sooner than I had thought.

Thankfully, for now it seems Van has been totally unaffected by the exchange and he hasn't even mentioned it since. Or maybe that means he was traumatized. Either way, we'll most likely be jumping on a more conventional Easter celebration next year. But for now, the ward Easter egg hunt seemed to be fulfilling enough for our two kiddos. :) They look happy to me! Not to mention cute as ever...

the big breakup

We have this polarizing relationship with our photography business. We love it. It's crazy exciting, it's natural, and it's super easy to imagine it becoming a career for both of us together. At the same time, we often feel pretty overwhelmed too. We've had so many conversations about what it would take to have Jon taper out of his day job and make photography work as a full-time job. We've asked every question, played over every possibility, dreamed every photographer's dream, and mixed and matched all the pieces so many times to make it fit.

About six weeks ago, when we were on the verge of making serious changes to move forward with Operation Full-Time Photography, one statement of concern and frustration led to an entire evening of discussion and a DTR with photography. There were tears, we laughed at ourselves, and we went home that night having decided to make a clean break. We broke up. There were thousands of reasons for this and believe me, we went over ALL our options. We needed to be able to focus on what is most important to us in life, and for whatever reason, photography was keeping us from those things.

We finally finished tying up all the loose ends just a couple days ago, ending with getting photos out for the beautiful wedding of a beautiful couple and leaving me feeling all warm and fuzzy about our experience with photography.

Since we decided to quit it's been strange and a little surreal, like it's all just been a wild dream. Strange because it was only 10 months but we feel like we've aged a decade. Strange because we loved it—and invested SO MUCH of ourselves into it—and left it. Strange because when we started the business we only saw two possible outcomes: it flops and we chalk it up to our 'life experiences' pile, or it flies and we move forward to make it a full-time job. Never did we foresee the third option: it's miraculously successful and we quit. Strange because I think we'll always miss it and be a little sad to not have it be such a big part of our lives anymore (we joke that we'll always be recovering professional photography addicts). Strange because I feel like there's so much more that went into this decision than I could ever say. It's so personal to us and so contingent upon our personal needs as a family that it doesn't even make sense when our reasoning comes out of our mouths trying to explain it to someone else. Especially because for some families, going forward with their big idea is completely right and what their family needs. We had to make the choice for what our family needs, and let everything else go.

It's been just as crazy of a year as we'd expected it to be, but we feel really good about it.
We threw ourselves into it one hundred percent, and even if it did mean a lot of sleep deprivation, late dinners, ridiculously large dirty dish pile-ups for days and laundry bins overflowing for weeks, we wouldn't undo anything we've done. We learned so much about photography and business, so much about our camera and extra equipment, so much about people and their real beauty, and so much about our limits, our priorities, and ourselves. That said, we will welcome the change to live life more wholeheartedly at home again and not spread ourselves so thin to so many people and responsibilities.

One thing's for sure, Jon and I are happy to focus more fully our two little crazies. We'll still be taking lots of photos, they'll just be at home of our family again, which is what we got our camera for in the first place. Maybe we'll even blog the photos (gasp!). No promises, but either way, I've got a feeling 2011's gonna be a breath of fresh air for the Smith family.

(the photos are a very small taste of catching up. They're long overdue since according to our blog photos Lila is 3 weeks old. She's actually 5 months...not a bad case of the second child syndrome, just a child born to parents with a crazy side business.)