Priorities

My attempt at being an avid blogger has failed. But, I come bearing excuses...

1. We were away for a week visiting family
2. Everyone in my house came down with the stomach flu, one after the other
3. I've had lots of photo shoots (which is a very good thing!)
4. The former excuse leads to numerous pictures to edit

But, really, I should stay on top of my blogging. It's important. Or so "they" say. I don't necessarily think I'm a great blogger, but here's hoping I'll improve with time.

On to the topic of my blog post. I've been thinking a lot about priorities lately. I love photography, and I love how many photo shoots I've been able to do and I love seeing my own improvement, and I love making people smile when they see their pictures. That's a lot of love. But it's true. Being a photographer is a great job for a people person/ people pleaser like me. I don't think I've ever loved any of my previous jobs before.

One thing that I can see being dangerous about this new profession is that it has the potential to consume me. After a photo shoot I could spend all day, every day, sitting at the computer looking through all the pictures, editing them, putting them on my blog and Facebook page. When I first started my new career-path in January I would literally spend all day on the computer after a photo shoot because I was just so excited. Even when my daughter was awake, I'd try to hold her with one hand while editing with the other. Don't worry, that quickly stopped as I told myself, "Nothing is more important than spending time with my family. No-thing." I've scaled back a lot. That's why you don't see as many pictures up as quick as I used to. But my time with my family is numero uno.

My daughter is turning 1 in just over a month (yup, that's insane! Seems like she was just born the other day) and she's constantly changing and growing and learning new things and I want to be part of it all. My pictures won't disappear if I put them off for a couple days if I'd rather go out with my daughter and play at the park or visit with other friends and their kids.

I know that as my business picks up, and I do more and more photo shoots, I'll need to be more strict about my work hours. That's hard to do when you work from home. I've been working out of my house as a hair stylist for over 2 years and it's the same thing. You need to set limits or people will take advantage of you, or you'll miss out on important life stuff.

So, you can keep me accountable for this too!

Family is first. Check. Then there's everything else. My husband and I have also recently started questioning our health situation as far as what we eat and what we put into our bodies, in general. I didn't used to care at all, but not that we have a baby in our lives things have changed a bit. Who cares if I eat Kraft dinner, but do I really want my daughter to have that crap in her system? Not so much. I won't go into details about it now, but we're hoping to replace some of the food in our house with healthier alternatives. That also requires making priorities within itself. Like what do we replace first? You can't do everything at once, that's a bit of an overdose, but step by step we'll get there. My friend has a blog that's all about this topic which has been SO inspiring to is. Check it out if you're even remotely interested. She writes in a way that's easy to understand.

That's the gist of it, I guess. Sorry if this was a boring post. I'm working on it! I need some ideas of what to blog about. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comment section!

Thanks for reading. Hope you're enjoying your Thursday, it's almost Friday! =)

(No pictures today since I'm not on my own computer, but I'm almost done editing pictures from Kherington's session so those might be up tonight yet!)