Five for Friday (on Sunday)

Less than two weeks before baby #3 arrives and I officially go on maternity leave! After much deliberation, I've decided to take an extended maternity leave for 2010. My hand shakes a little just typing that. I've hesitated to slow down the momentum my business has had, but realistically, I need that momentum to be a mother of three children under the age of 5!!

So here are my five goals for maternity leave this coming year:

1. Do the laundry. You think I'm kidding! ;) Anyone who works from home knows, though, that it's hard to leave work when it's a computer sitting in your living room. The law of entropy is alive and well in my house right now, and I feel sometimes like everything is just barely one step away from crumbling around me. So this year, in lieu of countless hours of editing, I'm really going to try to keep up with the laundry, vacuum more than once a month when book club comes over, and maybe even wash the fingerprints off the sliding glass door every once in a while. We'll see how it goes... ;)

2. Take more photos of my own kids. The cobbler's children with no shoes? Well, hardly, but I'm looking forward to really taking some of the pressure off making my photos of my kids all portraits, and just take more every day snapshots. With the hideous on-camera flash up, in terrible lighting, with tons of clutter behind and not necessarily a shallow depth-of-field. And then to DO something with my photos of my kids - get them off the computer, and put them in albums, or collages, or whatever.

3. Shoot for me and explore my photography in different ways. I hope the last one didn't scare you that I'm never going to do photography again. But I think taking a break professionally will give me some freedom to push myself to try new things. For example, I love natural lighting - it's beautiful. But I really have the urge to take out a friend or family member at 10:00 at night with my off-camera flash and play around with some crazy dramatic lighting. Hmmm... I'll keep you posted on how that turns out. And I love my creativity exercises - I may even try to do the "photo a day" to push myself to just shoot more. So keep with me on my blog - there won't be lots of client sessions, but I hope to have some fun stuff up there anyway, and I always welcome audience participation!!

4. Expand my creativity in other ways. Sewing and knitting, and I've even recently added embroidery - who knew?!? I finished knitting my first scarf - yea! And now I'm working on a baby hat. My mom laughs at my newly-founded domestic creativity, since it's certainly not something passed down from generation to generation in my family, but it's fun to learn new crafts and pursue new avenues of creativity...

5. Be a mom. Ok, this is #5, but really is #1. Maybe it's being sentimental about this being my last baby, or still having a hard time with the idea of my oldest being in preschool twice a week, or guilt that my soon-to-be-middle child is going to be kicked out of the role of family baby very soon. And I'm sure a lot of it is just hormones! But, I'm looking forward to more time with my kids. Time to cuddle with baby while my daughter takes a nap, or read books with the middle one while her big brother is in school. I realized I was getting too busy when I needed for my kids to take their naps at the same time so I could get work done. I'll never have this time back, you know?

So there it is...I'm stepping back, taking some time and refocusing. I hope you'll hang in there with me when my "photography blog" takes on a new direction, a path I'm looking forward to discovering.