Family Holiday Photos in Verona + New Years Goals

Confession – My holiday cards never made it out this year. I procrastinated, procrastinated, then rushed to design something, then procrastinated again, then thought…f* it! I’ll do better next year.

We did take our holiday photos this year in Verona, Italy and absolutely love how they came out. It’s always such a crazy mess and stressful when we take photos as a family, so I’m always surprised to see how good the finished product is.

We’ve been taking family photos abroad since I was pregnant with Little J (our maternity session in Croatia here), and it has been a good way to ensure we come home with good photos of all us. Last year, we did a photoshoot in Paris with Catherine O’hara {see it here}. And this year, we were lucky enough to find Marta Guenzi in Italy.

When I saw Marta’s portfolio, I immediately knew we would be compatible. Her style is elegant and romantic, and I had a feeling she would capture us perfectly in the beautiful setting of Verona.

Marta is also just the sweetest person ever. I don’t think I’ve ever seen John and Jaxson so completely at ease during a photo shoot. Even though we walked for hours around Verona, through the gardens of Giusti and cobble stone streets of the Old Town, we all happily followed Marta as we discovered little corners of the city for the perfect shot. She inadvertently became our city tour guide, which was a definite plus.

I wanted to showcase a bit of Italian elegance in the beautiful gardens, and something a bit more fun and whimsical around the pastel streets of this amazing city. I guess you can say my vision was to create a photo diary showing all the reasons why we love Italy so much. And these photos captured this that! Above all, Marta was able to capture the love and silliness of my little family, and the beauty of this magical city so perfectly.

Verona is indeed beautiful! No wonder Shakespeare chose this city as the set for the most famous love story of all time, Romeo & Juliet. We are definitely in love with it.

Here is a peek at the New Years card I intended on sending to friends and family….

Speaking of a new year, I wanted to quickly share my goals. I have some big goals for 2017 that I’ve been thinking about for a little while now and its getting me so excited but also keeping me up a night. I think we all need a little fire and passion constantly brewing to keep us motivated. I hope to have a lot to share with you all this year, so I hope you’ll stick around and share the journey with me.

To start, I going to begin living by 3 little words – “Grace, not perfection”.

I was inspired by this phrase from Emily Ley’s book by the same name. It really spoke to me. I’m a little controlling and a perfectionist. This year I felt burnt out quite often because I tried to achieve perfection – perfectly composed photos, a perfectly cohesive Instagram feed, be the perfect multi-tasking mom, the perfect everything. In doing so, I didn’t do anything well. If things weren’t perfect, I would wait for everything to be perfectly before I shared any real piece of my life, and I realized that all that does is keep me from sharing anything of substance or sharing none at all. So I’m trying to remember to give myself enough grace to share the simplicity, the messy and the ordinary life of a modern mom.

Other goals on my list are health (I’m currently on day 3 of my sugar cleanse and its going well!), faith and family. Keeping it simple and high level for now, but I’ll share more in the coming weeks as each of these things become more concrete, and share progress.

I hope you all are as excited for a fresh start as I am. If you want to share, I’d love to hear some of your goals too!