slowing down

I feel like daily I'm making attempts to keep up.

Attempts to clean a house, be a good mom, read my scriptures, keep to a schedule, make dinner...etc. Sometimes my attempts work and some days I feel like I've failed. 

One of my recent attempts was to get some family photos. We were rushed, as we are most days, and we headed up to the mountains after Kyle got home from work to snap a few pictures.

I had it in my head of what I wanted. We had found this beautiful spot from one of our gorgeous Sunday drives and we knew the changing colors would be perfect at this time.

We had had a bit of a rough start and we were running a little late, so I was hurrying to try and get things set up before we lost light. At some point early on in the setting up process my shutter speed on my camera was accidentally changed and slowed down... a nice little metaphor for what I would learn from this whole experience.

It was slowed down so much that many of the shots I had wanted to get all turned out blurry and didn't work out. 

I know what I set my shutter speed to. 

I don't know how it got changed... or why it didn't ruin all the photos.

When I got home and started searching through the pictures I quickly found that I was disappointed with the majority of the family shots. I started going through the in between shots desperate to find something. I didn't want the whole night to have been in vain... and as I found out, this night had been more than worth it.

Not getting the shots I wanted made me focus on some of the photos that I didn't really intend on taking. Most of the following pics were taken to help me adjust my camera settings to the changing light of the setting sun and taking some practice shots while I posed the family members.

Here's what I found.

A picture where I was making sure that the remote would work and giving Porter a chance to try it ended up giving me one of my favorite shots of me and my redhead.

 Bridger and Porter taking a dancing break while I fed Ford and tried to decide the next beautiful back drop of our family pictures.

 A perfect picture of my indescribably handsome husband holding our sweet Ford and trying to make him happy. I was waiting for the sun to go down so there wouldn't be that stark line in the background.

 Two little boys trying to make my third happy... and what I believe to be the first picture of all three boys together.

Everyone trying to give tickles and hugs and smiles to Ford while I was changing settings ended up giving me the first picture of my four boys together.

Too often I'm not focused on the important things... just like these pictures. I have it in my head what I want my days to look like and when they don't turn out the way I had planned I feel like I'm running behind. I get frustrated and feel like the world is moving 1000 times too fast and that there is no way to possibly catch up. 

What I've realized is that it's not about catching up, it's about slowing down.

I'm going to slow it down. I'm going to watch for all those little moments each day that I normally let pass on by without so much as a glance because I'm too busy planning for the next item on the agenda.

I'm really grateful that I didn't get the photos I was hoping for. I never would have noticed the ones that did work out, and that would have been the real tragedy.

Plus, I realized that blurriness can't completely ruin a photo... at least not when you've got my four handsome boys in front of the camera.