“Ali is unbelievably talented. It’s truly amazing how she captures the feeling of the moment and makes everyone SO comfortable. I know I’ll look back at our photos when my boys are big and it will transport me back in time. I cannot recommend her highly enough.” – The Roach-Gerber Fam

There’s going to come a day.

I know it’s hard to wrap your head around right now, as you stand at the kitchen window, watching your kiddos’ little legs carry them around your Vermont backyard like they’re kings of the world— living the kind of summer afternoon that feels like it stretches on forever. 

But there’s going to come a day— where their little legs aren’t so little anymore and they realize the world is a whole lot bigger than the patch of green where they grew up picking blueberries. Where they try to sort through the pictures playing across their mind and determine if they’re really memories, or just stories they’ve told themselves so often it feels true. A day where you’re still their hero, but life moves a little faster now, and they don’t always remember to say it out loud. 

Your average Vermont family photographer will tell you that your lifestyle family photos are for you, Mom and Dad. And they are, in a way.

But I’m not your average Vermont family photographer. And those photos matter just as much— maybe even a little bit more— to the little humans currently running around your backyard with blueberry juice on their faces, playing some game with twelve wildly intricate rules that only they understand.

Mind if I tell you why? (You might want to grab a box of Kleenex for this one…) 

Exhibit A: My Childhood

When they think of childhood, this is what they’ll see. 

The couch where they piled up with their heroes and little brother, shouting ‘look what I can do!’, as if your attention is the world’s best prize. 

The family dog that exists now as a foggy side character, but who they know full well basically helped raise them. 

The smile lines etched around their dad’s face, proof of a life well-lived and a family well-loved. 

The photos of these days are their visual inheritance. 

You can pass down your great-grandma’s wedding ring for them to place on your daughter-in-law’s finger someday. You can save up every extra dollar that didn’t go towards wet wipes for their sticky blueberry fingers.

But the 4×6’s that they have scattered around their future apartments and first homes are very possibly (read: most definitely) the things that will matter most. 

Want to really blow their future-tense minds? Turn it into an heirloom family album (which I will happily design for you, of course) and leave it out on the coffee table, so one day you can flip through it together while your grandkids run circles around the room.

Your Lifestyle Family Photos Help the Memories Stick

(You didn’t think I was going to take these frankly incredible lifestyle family photos of the Roach-Gerber children squishing blueberries in between their fingers and not beat the metaphor into the ground, did you?)

The thing about little human brains is there’s just no telling what will stick. You know better than most that it’s the Wild, Wild West up there. 

One minute they’re recounting something they saw you do when you didn’t even know they were watching. The next minute, they’re reciting a ten page dissertation on why Bluey is an institution and their wellbeing depends entirely on getting to watch it before bed. 

Childhood memories don’t form the way we expect them to. Sure, the extravagant themed birthday parties you threw for them and their twenty-seven “best friends” (allegedly) are important. 

But, more often than not, it’s the ordinary, seemingly unimportant bits and pieces in the seemingly less important places that settle in and stay. 

When you bring a whole new human into your home with a camera (that— can you believe it, Mom?!— she even lets your oldest son use) to document it in a creative way, you signal to your kids that, actually, something very important is happening here: 

Love. And the living of it. 

That’s the beauty of lifestyle family photos. You won’t find a list of family photo poses or forced smiles pasted on sticky faces in a hundred mile radius. Instead, it’s just a whole lot of real life unfolding in front of a camera, so the moments that make up a childhood have somewhere to live other than memory alone.

Wait, What Are Lifestyle Family Photos, Anyway?!

Lifestyle family photos have nothing to do with perfect smiles or carefully orchestrated family photo poses (if you have children, you know there’s nothing about your life that you’d describe as ‘orchestrated’). 

Lifestyle family photos are about the moments that slip past us while we’re busy living them. Maybe none of it feels particularly monumental in the given moment.

But these are the scenes that end up living in your children’s minds when they think back on what childhood felt like. They’re the moments that you don’t think matter all that much until, suddenly, they do.

Lifestyle family photos simply give those moments somewhere to stay.

The Very First People They Belonged To

As a mom myself, I’m (all too) familiar with *that one feeling*. You know the one. It keeps you up at night, staring at the ceiling and wondering if you should just give up on the idea of sleep entirely. Maybe forever. 

Am I totally botching this parent thing? (Told you that you knew the one.)

First off— no, you’re not. In fact, you’re rocking it. 

Shockingly, none of us have raised tiny humans before. It’s no wonder why we question our every move! We’ve been handed one of the most important jobs in the entire world, even though there are days we spill coffee down the front of our shirts and somehow end up with a gummy bear stuck in our bra. I mean, whose idea was this, anyway?!

But if you ever need proof that you did a pretty incredible job? (We all do.) 

Get the lifestyle family photos taken. Then, fast forward seventy years (you’re going to live a long life, okay?)

They’ll meet someone new, and as is par for the course when your childhood really stuck like theirs did, they’ll reach into their wallet and pull out a photo that’s been folded and unfolded one hundred times.

(Listen— I’m committed to bringing life on analog back, and you’re coming with me).

And they’ll say: “This was my mom. And this was my dad. They were the coolest.”

And they’ll miss you, of course. But more than anything they’ll miss that very moment— when you swung them between your arms as you walked through the blueberry patch in your Vermont backyard, and for a second there, it almost felt like they could touch the sky. 

One Day, These Will Be The Artifacts

The funny thing about photographs is that they don’t feel all that important while you’re taking them.

In the moment, it’s just a Tuesday in Vermont.  Someone’s missing a sock and having a meltdown about it, as if an exposed toe is the actual end of the world. Someone else is asking for a snack because, well… naturally. Your entire bed is covered in a week’s worth of laundry, and that little corner in the back of your mind won’t let you forget it.

It doesn’t feel like history. Furthest thing from it, in fact.

But give it a few decades.

One day, these lifestyle family photos will be the artifacts of a life that was once loud and sticky and full of small people who thought the sun rose and set on the two of you.

They’ll be the proof that this was home. That this was childhood. That this was the place where they learned that they were loved.

And long after the blueberry patches and backyard games and bedtime negotiations fade into the unfairness of passing time, these frames will still be there, holding the story of the people who loved them first.

I’d be honored to help you hold onto it.