a photo blog by lee kriel.
exciting and inspiring for me to think about. wouldn’t this be great in our schools. my one volunteer job at school is in the computer lab and sometimes the kids are actually teaching me as there is no fear base since technology has been a part of their whole lives. coding would be an important layer in how it all works. plus, who wouldn’t want to have a job one day in these awesome working environments.
- Lee, I wish i had seen a video like this when i was in grammar school. Great piece. Thanks for sharing. I'm sending it to some friends right now, especially friends with kids and grandkids.
you are my i love you by maryann k cusimano
I am your parent you are my child
I am your quiet place, you are my wild
I am your calm face, you are my giggle
I am your wait, you are my wiggle
I am your audience, you are my clown
I am your London Bridge, you are my falling down
I am your Carrot Sticks, you are my licorice
I am your dandelion, you are my first wish
I am your water wings, you are my deep
I am your open arms, you are my running leap
I am your way home, you are my new path
I am your dry towel, you are my wet bath
I am your dinner you are my chocolate cake
I am your bedtime, you are my wide awake
I am your finish line, you are my race
I am your praying hands, you are my saving grace
I am your favourite book, you are my new lines
I am your nightlight, you are my sunshine
I am your lullaby, you are my peek-a-boo
I am your kiss goodnight, you are my I love you
meet sue mead. a mom raising two beautiful, active girls with her lovely husband alex. the mead family had some challenges early on when their oldest daughter julia was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 3. avery was just turning one. julia is now in remission and sue and her family continue to help those in need, especially by supporting families who are making the same transition they did years ago as they embark on living with cancer. one way is by organizing a swim-a-thon each summer to raise money for child life at johns hopkins children’s center as well as meals for families who find themselves in the hospital over thanksgiving and christmas. she gathers all the neighborhood kids and encourages them to get sponsors and swim laps in the river. it is one of my children’s favorite events as they love to compete with the other kids and make hashtags on the dock to mark their laps. even the adults have a time to swim (with cocktails too, of course for those not swimming!). she has raised thousands and not only made a difference in her efforts for johns hopkins but also for those in our neighborhood by being an example of how to give back. enjoy her story in her own words below (or as she says “off the cuff words” which is what i love about her!) and her continued journey through motherhood.
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WHAT ARE A FEW OF YOUR FAVORITE THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR GIRLS?
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Cooking, sailing, skiing, traveling and doing activities that show them things about the world.
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WHAT IS YOUR MOST HUMBLING MOMENT AS A MOM?
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I don’t know if this makes sense, but it was coming to the realization in the last few years that my girls are not me, they will not like many of the things I liked, they may not like to read like I do, they will make their own path, and I have to have the patience and respect to set them free to do that. Also, I think when Julia was sick, the amount of help that came from neighbors and friends near and far was a very humbling experience–a true lesson in accepting help and seeing the value of letting people share their kindness.
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LIST A FEW OF THE GIRLS FAVORITE THINGS.
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Their Build-a-Bears, Eleanor and Bella, Avery’s blankie, their American Girl dolls and fairy collection. Julia loves Irish dance (which involves a lot of clomping on my hard wood floors!) Avery loves to talk, like all the time, to anyone who will listen.
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WHEN IT CAME TO DECORATING THIER ROOMS…
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Avery’s room is the same color blue we painted when we moved in 12 years ago. For her 8th birthday this year she has requested a color change to green. She sleeps in her grandfather’s old bed, now painted white. Julia’s room, once yellow and blue, was transformed in a makeover by Maine Cottage when she was diagnosed with cancer. Almost seven years later, it remains much the same, beautiful as ever.
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WHAT IS THE BEST ADVICE YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN AS A MOM?
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Standing outside post-op recovery a few minutes after hearing the words, “You daughter’s brain tumor is cancerous,” my mom grabbed me, her arms on my arms, and made me look straight into her weepy eyes and told me “You are strong like me. You can do this, you can do this.” Then I turned and walked through those doors and saw our baby bandaged and sick and I just kept muttering that mantra to myself. Some days, even 7 years later, I still do.
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HOW DO YOU CREATE BALANCE BETWEEN MOTHERHOOD AND CAREER?
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Easy, just don’t work. No seriously, I went back to work part time last year after 9 years of being home. It was rough. This year I am still part time but working two full days instead of every day for a half day has been much better. Plus, I am working at a new school this year which is one of the most positive places I have ever worked. So that helps.
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WHAT IS YOUR BEAUTY ROUTINE?
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Don’t have one. It also helps to not really give a shit about what other people think or say about you…make-up or no make-up, who the hell really cares at this point!
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WHAT IS YOUR EXERCISE ROUTINE?
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ditto the above.
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SOMETHING YOU WISH YOU COULD DO BETTER AS A MOM…
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Not to be as nit picky and short with the girls and fewer “mommy dearest moments” would be nice, but I don’t ever beat myself up about it. I know I am trying my best at the moment and sometimes I fall short, we all do, get over it and move on.
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WHAT IS YOUR PROUDEST MOMENT AS A MOM?
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When I see my girls being good to each other and worrying and taking care of each other, I know I am doing something right in raising kind and loving young ladies. Also, seeing Julia as an orphan in the school production of Annie just took my breathe away. Here she was, six years to the day of having brain surgery, dancing and singing and looking beautiful–she could have sung off key for all I cared–I couldn’t watch her without getting weepy just marveling at how far we have made it when so many other kids didn’t.
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DO YOU HAVE DATE NIGHTS?
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A date, what’s that? We are bad at this. Have only ever used a babysitter a handful of times. Leaving our kids after what we have been through is not our strong suit. That being said, we tend to cash in our chips all at once and leave the kids with the grandparents for weekends away, a trip to Jamaica, we went sailing for 10 days in the Grenadines when Julia was a baby, does that still count as a long date?
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WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PART OF THE DAY?
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Snuggling the girls to bed and awake in the morning. I know the time will come when I won’t be allowed in and I will miss this so I try to remember that.
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HARDEST PART OF BEING A MOM?
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Taking care of me as I come last in the pecking order.
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A FEW THINGS THAT KEEP YOU SANE…
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Alex (except when he acts like my 3rd child). My mom, my close group of girlfriends, reading a good book (which helps me take my mind off all the bad stuff) and escaping on our sailboat (even if we are only anchored across the river).
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do you have a favorite recipe?
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chili ala cooking light
1 lb ground turkey
1 c chopped onion
4 minced garlic cloves
1 T oregeno
1 1/2 tsp chili powder
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp of cinnamon
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 15 oz kidney bean (drained)
1 14 oz stewed tomato (chili style)
1 16 oz tomato sauce (chili style)
coat dutch oven with pam. add beef, onion, garlic, cook until meat is browned and drain well. add oregano and next 8 ingredients.
stir well. cover, reduce heat and simmer 20 min. uncover if you like thicker. double or triple it to freeze for leftovers.
xo.
a good friend just sent me this video about an article that struck a nerve with all moms. the response was overwhelming from a blog entry on the huffington post about moms getting in the picture. i couldn’t help not only thinking of myself, but all the times when i am photographing a family do i hear the mom say, “oh, just photograph the kids, i don’t need to be in any”. usually i talk them into it, but it takes lots of convincing. and they are always happy they did exclaiming, “i am never in any photos”.
personally, as a mom and the family photographer, i have tried to be better about being in photos, and they are not always as spontaneous as i would like as i usually have to remind my husband to take the photo and prove i was on vacation with the family. and it is usually with a eye roll that i am exaggerating, but after three years of posting one photo a day for my family on a blog, i think i was in maybe a dozen. maybe. three years. that is 1,095 days of photos.
her article brought me to tears. maybe because i am past some of the stages that i wish were documented. maybe because i could picture myself in all those scenarios and i want my children to remember that i was there too. right beside them. and it is not to say that we don’t have a million photos and ways of documenting our daily life with instagram, facebook, blogs, etc, but being a child of a mother who died at 45, i truly cherish every last print of us that i have of her. together. me and her.
finally, not being a fan of “selfles” of myself, i will try to include myself in more photos with my children, as i definitely don’t want this “middle school pre-adolecent stage” to pass me by without letting my kids know that i was there. through it all. now if i could only convince them to get in the picture too.
here is allison’s article in full. enjoy. and remember to get in the picture. thank you allison for the reminder.
Last weekend, my family traveled to attend my oldest niece’s Sweet Sixteen party. My brother and sister-in-law planned this party for many months and intended it to be a big surprise, and it included a photo booth for the guests.
I showed up to the party a bit late and, as usual, slightly askew from trying to dress myself and all my little people for such a special night out. I’m still carrying a fair amount of baby weight and wearing a nursing bra, and I don’t fit into my cute clothes. I felt awkward and tired and rumpled.
I was leaning my aching back against the bar, my now 5-month-old baby sleeping in a carrier on my chest (despite the pounding bass and dulcet tones of LMFAO blasting through the room) when my 5-year-old son ran up to me.
“Come take pictures with me, Mommy,” he yelled over the music, “in the photo booth!”
I hesitated. I avoid photographic evidence of my existence these days. To be honest, I avoid even mirrors. When I see myself in pictures, it makes me wince. I know I am far from alone; I know that many of my friends also avoid the camera.
It seems logical. We’re sporting mama bodies and we’re not as young as we used to be. We don’t always have time to blow dry our hair, apply make-up, perhaps even bathe (ducking). The kids are so much cuter than we are; better to just take their pictures, we think.
But we really need to make an effort to get in the picture. Our sons need to see how young and beautiful and human their mamas were. Our daughters need to see us vulnerable and open and just being ourselves — women, mamas, people living lives. Avoiding the camera because we don’t like to see our own pictures? How can that be okay?
Too much of a mama’s life goes undocumented and unseen. People, including my children, don’t see the way I make sure my kids’ favorite stuffed animals are on their beds at night. They don’t know how I walk the grocery store aisles looking for treats that will thrill them for a special day. They don’t know that I saved their side-snap, paper-thin baby shirts from the hospital where they were born or their little hospital bracelets in keepsake boxes high on the top shelves of their closets. They don’t see me tossing and turning in bed wondering if I am doing an okay job as a mother, if they are okay in their schools, where we should take them for a vacation, what we should do for their birthdays. I’m up long past the news on Christmas Eve wrapping presents and eating cookies and milk, and I spend hours hunting the Internet and the local Targets for specially-requested Halloween costumes and birthday presents. They don’t see any of that.
Someday, I want them to see me, documented, sitting right there beside them: me, the woman who gave birth to them, whom they can thank for their ample thighs and their pretty hair; me, the woman who nursed them all for the first years of their lives, enduring porn star-sized boobs and leaking through her shirts for months on end; me, who ran around gathering snacks to be the week’s parent reader or planning the class Valentine’s Day party; me, who cried when I dropped them off at preschool, breathed in the smell of their post-bath hair when I read them bedtime stories, and defied speeding laws when I had to rush them to the pediatric ER in the middle of the night for fill-in-the-blank (ear infections, croup, rotavirus).
I’m everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me with them. Someday I won’t be here — and I don’t know if that someday is tomorrow or thirty or forty or fifty years from now — but I want them to have pictures of me. I want them to see the way I looked at them, see how much I loved them. I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect to love, but I am perfectly their mother.
When I look at pictures of my own mother, I don’t look at cellulite or hair debacles. I just see her — her kind eyes, her open-mouthed, joyful smile, her familiar clothes. That’s the mother I remember. My mother’s body is the vessel that carries all the memories of my childhood. I always loved that her stomach was soft, her skin freckled, her fingers long. I didn’t care that she didn’t look like a model. She was my mama.
So when all is said and done, if I can’t do it for myself, I want to do it for my kids. I want to be in the picture, to give them that visual memory of me. I want them to see how much I am here, how my body looks wrapped around them in a hug, how loved they are.
I will save the little printed page with four squares of pictures on it and the words “Morgan’s Sweet Sixteen” scrawled across the top with the date. There I am, hair not quite coiffed, make-up minimal, face fuller than I would like — one hand holding a sleeping baby’s head, and the other wrapped around my sweet littlest guy, who could not care less what I look like.
meet michelle and her beautiful family. i first met michelle about 5 years ago for a family session. michelle is a mom of three boys and i have been enjoying photographing her family since. she has amazing energy and she runs a good ship. she is the kind of person who returns your email as soon as she gets it, all business, no procrastinating…i love that! she is beautiful, strong, athletic and her style is always impeccable from what she is wearing to how her home is decorated. and her boys are maturing into amazing fine, young gentleman.
for each session, she sends the boys off with me and they are so flexible and up for anything, with of course, well mannered please’s and thank you’s to go along with it. i admire her (being the mother of three boys myself) and wonder what her secrets are for raising such nice young men. she seems like the type of person who would drop everything if you called her, and would figure out a way to get there to help if you needed her. her boys are following in her footsteps. and her boys adore her. all of them. they all call her “mom”, even her husband richie! i thought it would be fun to share some insight into her life as a mom and feature her for my “that mom” series. enjoy getting to know her and her handsome family.
what would better complete your tailgating festivities than adding some hen house linens. jenny, a university of north carolina grad added a little personalization to her linens for the perfect spirited tailgating setting. and in honor of her husband, a navy alum, she added the familiar slogan “beat army” to her aprons ribbon.
have a good weekend! enjoy your game day!
xo
i was invited to tag along to nyc with the hens (jenny davids and katherine poole) last week as they met with editors of magazines who are interested in their product. it was amazing as always to be in the city as well as back in the grind a bit as i watched these two very inspirational women at work. during our visit we had lunch at home, a quaint little restaurant in west greenwich village that served the most amazing macaroni and cheese and chocolate pudding! they allowed us access to set the tables with hen house linens and set up for a mini photo shoot. their hospitality made me feel right at home, probably hence the name. thank you jenny and katherine for allowing me to join you!
by Lee
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