I'm well versed in traveling with children, painful road trips, scrambling for ideas to distract the little people in the back, without being able to explain why it's taking so long, or tell a white lie like, "we're nearly there". 

But life is not a race. Make time for the pit stops. 

Have you ever wished you could have an authentic, all-encompassing photographic story of your family’s life?

Not a last-minute portrait session before the holidays, or a mad scramble to don matching outfits and smiles in front of a curtain, but a real, honest-to-goodness portrayal of the crazy, quiet, cozy, obnoxious, loving, warm, or plain inexplicable moments your family burns through in a single year?

Today it snowed again. It's still not officially winter, but I've got a roaring fire going and some light music, too much coffee, and two sleeping dogs. Lots of inspiration for this blog post, a collection of my favourite images from 2016 depicting snuggle and smooch moments. 

While blissfully immersed in my stolen slice of time-space at Toronto Pearson Terminal 1, I was perusing the shelves of a bookstore, looking for a quick and painless read (I sometimes like my literature to be like my photography). I picked up a book called Dirty Rowdy Thing, by someone called Christina Lauren (actually two people), and bought it without hesitation.

I consumed it while on the plane, and that, my friends, was the beginning of my love affair with contemporary romance.

The mare curls her lip and butts the Kid in the face. He falls backwards, lands on his butt in the wet grass, starts to cry. There's no blood, no scrapes, no bruises, but the Kid's heart hurts. He's lost his surety, maybe his trust. Some horses are like that, Kid, I tell him. You gotta be careful. But some horses aren't. You just can't know it on the outside.

Photography shouldn't be like going to the dentist. Whether you're on the front or back end of that lens, it should happen painlessly.

I’m not worried about what lies above,

I am concerned with what emerges.

How meaning comes to be.

How lines and dots and shadow

come to resemble memories

that fade

and are extinguished once you’re gone.

Maybe it's ironic that toward the end of my academic career, I was fighting tooth and nail to dismiss with subjective rating scales of parenting quality, and focus on the moment-to-moment behaviours, without judgments or messages. Or maybe it's telling.

When I shot on auto for years, whether I got real good stills of motion or blurry ones kind of depended on external factors. How much light was coming in, mostly. I'm into limitations, so it was a little bit neat to wait and see what turned up.

where we expect only the aftermath of drought,

there is sometimes, also, 

barefaced life.

I have tremendous respect for photographers who are good at posing their clients, getting the best angles of their faces, and achieving beautiful portraits as a result. It's hard to do it well, so it earns a huge tip of my proverbial hat.

Me? I'm maybe not one of those photographers.

When it was time to end the journey, we had a similarly limitless amount of possibilities to come home to. Canada, the vast. 

We chose a place close to my family. A place we could pursue another dream: living on the land, having sheep and chickens and all the rest, and green fields for the kids to thread their bare feet through. There was never really much of a question. Even if it meant walking away from academia.