All three of my babies are in school this year, babies I gave cooing nicknames to not five seconds ago. A third grader. A first grader. And the 2s.
Read on to discover:
September’s Six Pics, in full and free, including one I’ve never published anywhere
The first-day-of-school photo you really should be taking
The portrait-mode trick I gave a national magazine and never told you about
Why I’m telling you not to buy a new backpack
A reader’s flowers, and the fifteen-second recording I want you to make today
Squeakie, Noodles and DiDi are all heading out into the world for hours a day now, without their mama. Nobody outside this house knows why any of them are called what they’re called.
Squeakie, because as a baby, Colette squeaked like a literal mouse, from the moment she came out to her first birthday. It was so so cute and I took endless videos of it! Watching those videos now makes my heart swell and my breath catch.
Noodles because calling out “Noooooooooodles!!” was so fun to say, and it made him laugh.
DiDi because it is a cute, natural, easy-to-say shortening of Elodie, and it stuck so hard that I added it to her paperwork for pre-school.
Here’s the thing nobody warns you about. The nicknames expire. Not on a date, and not with an announcement. One day you call across a parking lot and the eight-year-old turns around with a face that says Ew. And you will not have known, on the last ordinary morning you said it, that it was the last ordinary morning you said it.
I have made an entire career out of catching the things you can see. I have almost nothing on the things you can hear.
So here’s one free before the actual advice, and it takes fifteen seconds. Open your voice memos. Say your kid’s nicknames out loud, where they came from, and how old they are right now.
That’s it, one recording. In five years, this will be the most meaningful file on your phone. And it will cost you the length of a red light.
Back to School: Spend Where the Camera Looks
I’m equal parts excited / an emotional puddle. Four times this week I’ve made the joke (stolen from my friend Susan who is much funnier than me) that I’m like a marathoner elbowing her way to the finish line, leg broken and covered in something icky. I’m at that part of the summer as a parent. But I also feel the deep magnetic pull of the book closing on my baby being a baby. I no longer have two kids and a baby, I have three full on kid-kids.
And now, since no one asked, here’s my one piece of back-to-school advice.
I’m not good at school supplies, because I always just get to Target and buy pretty pens and not whatever I came for. But I’m good at looking at pictures, so here’s what I know from the looking: the backpack is in every single photograph of your kid for the next nine months. The lunchbox is in none of them. It lives in a cubby from 8:30 to 3:00 and comes home inside the backpack.
So the backpack gets your attention. The lunchbox gets whatever is on sale.
This isn’t about vanity, and it isn’t about spending more. It’s that your family’s photo record has a wardrobe department, you’re the one staffing it, and right now you’re staffing it in a fluorescent aisle at 8pm while a two-year-old removes one shoe and licks it.
Which brings me to the thing I actually want you to do this week.
The September Six: Photo Prompts for Parents
Let’s fkn go.
I promised you five more prompts today. Here they are, plus the one you already have, all in one place.
Free for everybody this month, because September is the test run and I want to see what happens when a few hundred of us shoot the same six things.
They take about a minute each. Do all six, do two, do one. Do none and just read along, that’s allowed too.
1. THE GASP
One thing / moment / action this month that made your body do the little internal ooh. No researching it, no justifying it. If you gasped, shoot it.
Why: this one repeats every single month, forever, because it’s my whole philosophy in one assignment. Your ooh instinct has been right more often than your eyes have.
2. THE BOOKENDS
Pick one thing per kid. Photograph it on the first day of school and again on the last day. Same spot, same framing, same distance. Not the kid. The thing.
What thing? Your call, but here's mine.
For my third grader, it’s her handwriting. For my first grader, it’s the backpack that swallowed him in kindergarten and doesn’t quite anymore. For my first-time preschooler, it’s a brand-new tiny pair of shoes that will be destroyed by June.
You cannot see a year happening while it happens. Two frames, nine months apart, and suddenly you can.
How: whatever you pick, make it easy to find again. The front door. The same tree. The corner of the porch. If it’s paper, shoot from directly above, near a window, with the phone flat and parallel to the page so the lines stay straight.
Now open your calendar and put it in June. You will forget. Everyone forgets, and the second frame is where all the meaning lives.
I’ll remind you too. It’s already on mine.
3. THE 4 O’CLOCK WALL
You’ve had this one since Wednesday, and a reader asked me a question about it that made me realize I named it badly. So here’s the fixed version.
Four o’clock is a mood, not an appointment.
Do not stand in your kitchen at 3:58 PM waiting for something to happen. What I’m actually asking is for you to start noticing when the light in your house does something. It might be 7am on the stairs. It might be 6:30 in the bathroom, of all places. It might genuinely be four, in which case, lucky you.
The light has moved since July, and it will move again before November, so the answer you find this month is only good for this month. Find the wall or the patch of floor where it’s doing something now, and shoot only that. Look across from wherever your windows are. No people required.
Why: you’re learning your own house. Once you know where the good light lives and when, you’ll start standing your kid in it without thinking about it. That’s the actual skill, and everything else is a setting.
This one is less an assignment than a practice of learning to see.
4. THE SELFIE PORTRAIT TRICK
Here’s one I have genuinely never published here, and it’s the most useful thing in this list.
Portrait mode on the back camera needs about four feet to work, which is useless when the subject is a moving child. So: open portrait mode, switch to the front-facing camera, then turn the phone around so your kid is in the frame instead of you.
The shorter focal length lets you shoot from about six inches away, and it focuses faster. Hit the volume-up button to fire, and shoot in rapid succession.
As you do this move, you genuinely can't see what you're doing. Ha! So exciting! I dare you to try it. It is addicting.
And one more thing… You are going to miss most of the shots. Keep trying. Even though I’ve been doing this trick for years, most of mine are absolute garbage.
But when it hits, it is truly breathtaking. I can't wait for you to hit it right the first time.
Why: it turns the one lens that can’t handle kids into the one that can. I gave this tip to PureWow a couple of years ago, and I hadn’t yet started Six Pics then! It's funny to reread because it calls me a mom of two, which was true at the time.
Follow me on Instagram for a front-facing portrait hack how-to, coming up soon!
5. YOU. IN THE PICTURE.
Non-negotiable. Every month. Forever.
Prop the phone on a shelf and use the timer, or hand it to a seven-year-old and let them cook.
Why: your kids will not care about your hair. They will care that you were there.
6. THE LAST WARM EVENING
One more night this month, everybody ends up outside without a jacket and nobody planned it. That’s the one.
Why: you won’t know it’s the last one until it already was. September endings don’t announce themselves, which is the argument for shooting all of them.
I’m definitely going to have this in mind when I take my family to Sagg Main Beach this weekend.
Can I See Your 4 PM Wall Pics?
I made two asks last week. One was to scroll back through your August photos and find the one you had already taken without anyone telling you to. The other was the first prompt of The Six, the wall.
Both were answered immediately, which I did not expect.
Janis [11:45 AM] sent flowers she’d bought herself in August, with the caption: “Well…why shouldn’t I buy myself flowers?” Reader, she should. She should absolutely buy herself flowers. This is what I meant. Not a technically perfect photograph. A photograph of somebody deciding she was worth a small, nice thing on an ordinary day.
Lauren said, “I’m obsessed with how light moves through my house.”
Maureen [10:00 PM] said, “It’s 10pm, not 4pm, partial credit??”
Thank you to everyone who sent in photos! I am genuinely a proud photo cheerleader today. Aren’t these GREAT!?
So send me yours. Post a note and tag me, drop it in the comments, or DM me.
One photo, one line about which prompt it is. I'm featuring what comes in: the ones that made somebody stop scrolling and go ohhhh.
What I’m Actually Buying as a Photographer and Mom of 3
This post contains affiliate links via ShopMy and Amazon. If you buy through them, it costs you nothing and occasionally buys me a latte!
Three kids, three milestones, and a shorter list than you’d think.
The third grader
This is the year they start choosing for themselves, and the choices go sideways. Colette has opinions now and the opinions are not mine.
Let her pick, even when it’s not your taste. Especially when it isn’t. In four years, you will not remember the backpack you would have chosen. You will remember exactly which one she wanted and how sure she was about it.
And no, you do not need a new backpack. We buy one every couple of years around here and this isn’t a new year for the big two. Photographically, the old one is the better object anyway: a backpack you keep for three years is a fixed thing hanging on a kid who is not fixed at all. Buy a new one every September and you’ve thrown out your control group.
What she is getting: a bag charm or three. As many as the zipper pull can structurally support. She will curate them, rearrange them, trade one at recess, and come home devastated about it. Is this the year the backpack stops being a container and starts being a whole personality? That’s what I’m gathering.
It's cool to watch my daughter assemble a statement about who she is. Not an outfit I bought or a room I decorated. A cluster of small plastic objects she chose, in an order she decided, hanging off a bag she picked. It’s the closest thing a third grader has to a byline.
And it will be completely different by spring, so photograph it. Not a snapshot of the bag. In close, fill the frame, use good window light, and treat the cluster the way you would treat a face.
Her bookend: photograph the handwriting, not just the sign.
Take the chalkboard photo, if you must. I’m not going to pretend I don’t want the chalkboard photo too.
But then hand them a piece of paper and have them write it out themselves. My name is [your kid] and this is my first day of third grade.
Backwards S, letters running downhill off the right edge, whatever comes out.
Shoot it from directly above, near a window, phone flat and parallel to the paper so the lines stay straight. Let the paper fill the frame. Get close enough to see where the pencil pressed too hard.
Even a scribble counts, because kids move from drawing with the whole arm and shoulder to drawing with just the wrist and fingers, so a year of scribbles is a year of your kid rewiring how their hand works.
Handwriting changes the same way a face does over the course of a school year. It gets smaller, steadier, and more sure of itself. You cannot see it happening while it happens.
Then, in June. Same paper, same window, same kid. My name is [your kid] and this is my last day of third grade.
Those two photos are the first and last pages of a book, which means everything between them is what you make over the next nine months. So start it tonight while you’re still thinking about it. Open your phone, make a new album, and name it with your kid’s name and the grade. Every time something from this year lands in your camera roll, drop it in. Picture day hair. The soccer thing. The lunchbox she refuses to retire.
In June you’ll have the whole year in one place instead of scattered across eleven thousand photos, and the book will more or less already be built.
The first grader
He's still carrying last year's bag. It came home from kindergarten enormous and it isn't enormous now. Nobody watched that happen. It happened at a rate no eye can detect, over a summer, while we were at the beach.
You can’t see it. You can photograph it.
Buying: sneakers he can fasten himself, because first grade is the year of doing it alone and Velcro is not a compromise, it’s independence. A jacket with a hood, because first graders do not carry umbrellas, they simply become wet. And then probably nothing else. Check the school list, check the closet, go outside.
His bookend: the back of his head. Walking away from you, last year’s bag still hanging near the backs of his knees. Down the hallway, the driveway, the sidewalk, whatever you’ve got. No face required. The whole story is in the shoulders and the direction of travel.
First morning, last morning, same spot.
The 2s
Five mornings a week, a lunch box the size of a paperback, and a cubby with her name on it written by somebody who is not me.
Elodie did get her first backpack, though! She loves butterflies so of course I picked a ridiculous shiny one covered in them. She’s, shall we say, jazzed about it.
Confession: with the third kid, you buy less, and you photograph less. Both are efficiencies, and only one of them is a mistake. I have thousands of frames of Squeakie’s firsts and I’m not going to pretend the count is the same for DiDi. That’s just facts.
This is me correcting that.
Buying: almost nothing. She has two older siblings and a house full of hand-me-downs and that is genuinely fine. Except shoes. New ones, chosen by her, not inherited. One new thing so this year belongs to her and not to the archive of her brother and sister. Plus a change of clothes for the cubby, the least romantic purchase in this entire newsletter and the one you’ll be most grateful for.
Her bookend: the shoes. Clean exactly once. Straight down from standing height, both feet in frame, before the walk to the door wrecks them. Again in June, when they’re unrecognizable.
And one more, which is the one that will get you. Preschool drop-off is a teacher taking your baby out of your arms while you stand there. Take that picture. Stay out of the frame.
You have a thousand photographs of your baby and almost none of your baby being loved by other people, and this is the morning that gap starts closing whether you document it or not.
Tool of the Trade:
You’re amassing your yearly school album digitally, of course. But for immediate at-home printing: This SELPHY printer is still my #1.
The Weekly Ooh: Worry Stones
This video of massively talented crafter Lydia Rowley made me gasp. She’s making back-to-school worry “stones”, something you have in your pocket and run your fingertips over in case you’re feeling off. (Do I need one for me?)
If you make one, photograph the stone before you give it away. That's the second half of the gift, and it costs ten seconds. Just like we did with Instax print gifts, remember? P.S. The photo in that post is a 4 PM shadow, guess that’s been my thing for a while now!
Links I Texted This Week
Apparently, I didn’t read at all in the last seven days. Or what I did read didn’t make it through my Swiss cheese Labor Day Weekend brain.
Did I ever mention that I grew up on a beach with a roller coaster on it? It’s true, and now that I’m older, I think it’s super duper cool. I'm headed home soon to take my own kids there, and I am pretty excited about seeing their faces.
‘Fit Check: Picture Day is Coming
Have my eye on this tee for my cheeky son.
And these leggings for my eight-year-old daughter! She’s super into leopard prints right now (I mean, same).
Would you like some Picture Day tips? I'm putting it to the Committee, which is what I'm calling you, dear readers, when there’s a vote.
The Seventh Pic: Meme of the Week
None of this is actually about buying more. Though admittedly, I am into objects, having them, thinking about them, pondering what they mean. I’m also a frequent victim of consumerism eating my brain. It’s a push-pull. Most of these are mindsets; the buying is optional.
It’s about knowing, in the fluorescent aisle at 8pm, which of these things is going to be in the pictures. That’s the only expertise I have to offer here, and it took nineteen years and 155,000 frames a year to get it, so please take it.
Six prompts. One minute each. Send me what you get, because in October The Six becomes a paid perk with one prompt always free, and I would very much like to fill that issue with your photographs instead of only mine.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have about four feet left in this marathon and I intend to crawl them, while looking at the light down here.
hugs!!
Ana
This is testimony to your talents as a writer, photographer, mother, and wife. Let’s take the long way home.
Read this one twice! xx