Christina's Blog

Announcing the “Spring Blooms” Portrait Event for Children – May 2011

Come celebrate the magic of childhood with beautiful outdoor mini-sessions designed to be quick and easy… and FUN!  Sessions will be held May 20-21 at the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh and May 22 at Sears Farm Rd Park in Cary.  I promise this will be way more fun than wandering the aisles of Target this week-end or teaching your kids to share the family game console – and you get to check off the “get updated portraits of kids” part of your to-do list.  All sessions are available by appointment only and your session fee of $65 will be applied towards your choice of 3 print packages.

Check out the details and let me know if you have any questions!

I was recently asked to photograph a Beads of Courage training event at NC Children’s Hospital for Striving for More, Inc (one of my favorite non-profits to help!)   For those of you not familiar with Striving for More, they are a local non-profit organization founded by Cary resident Diane Moore after losing her daughter to cancer in 2008.  Witnessing first-hand the true lack of emotional support services in place for most families dealing with childhood cancer, Diane established this organization to encourage and fund services such as the Beads of Courage program.  Beads of Courage is a non-profit organization that encourages children to use colorful beads to document their own personal journey with cancer including their treatments, procedures, and hospital stays.  There are only 3 other hospitals in North Carolina that currently have this program in place, so it is very exciting that Striving for More has helped bring it to the NC Children’s Hospital in Chapel Hill!  I am sharing a few of my favorite images from the training sessions held in February.

Approximately 12,500 children are diagnosed with cancer annually in the United States.  Please take a moment to visit Striving for More online and read more about Diane’s story at her blog.  You can learn more about the Beads of Courage program online as well – please share these valuable resources with family and friends who may be in need of such support.

Striving for More – Beads of Courage – NC Children’s Hospital

Living in the same house for over 8 years means you accumulate lots of stuff – clothes you’ve outgrown get boxed in the attic, old toys get stashed in the garage, DVDs your kids no longer watch sit stacked on a shelf.  In the beginning stages of moving we grabbed a few boxes and started with the easy things we knew we’d be bringing with us, but probably wouldn’t need over the next month.  Then the reality crept in that we were going to need much more than “a few” boxes and that we really needed to get organized to determine what things we should give away (or throw away) and what we wanted to keep.  If you haven’t done this kind of de-cluttering in a while, it might be surprising just how hard it is.  There is of course the initial layer of junk that’s obvious and it’s fairly easy to fill a few boxes of items to donate, but mostly it’s pretty tough to separate out our needs from our emotional attachment to things.

I actually thought this would be harder for the kids, but I was totally off-base.  A perfect example was the day Zander and I tackled his bookshelf.  I let him start by just looking through his stack of books and grabbing any he really loved, but he only grabbed 2 (out of like 40!)  Clearly he would be sad not to take more of them, I thought, so I started taking them off the shelf one at a time and asking him “keep or donate?”  He breezed right through this part, and mostly said “donate” in a very sure voice – I, on the other hand, kept sneaking my favorites into the keep pile.  I had perfectly logical reasons – this one I gave him for Valentine’s Day when he was 2 and I even wrote a little note inside, this one was his favorite bedtime story for almost 4 months, this one was the first book he “read” to me.  As I sat in the pile of books that day I realized that I was going to have the toughest time with this moving thing… because truthfully I probably had accumulated the most memories in this house.  It’s not the “stuff” we want to keep, but the memories they carry, the moments they represent.

We eventually finished our packing, threw away most of our junk, donated a lot great items, and moved in to our new house.  But I’m not going to feel bad at all about the yellow toy bunny stashed away in my new closet – it was the first toy that ever made Jillian laugh and I’m not ever going to want to let go of that memory, even if it takes an extra box to keep it around.

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