Dear Ava,

I was giving you a bath the other day and I looked at you and almost had a panic attack. My baby was getting so big and I realized, soon enough, you wouldn’t want to play in the tub pretending to be a mermaid underwater or playing with your My Little Pony’s or splashing water out of the tub even though I just told you a million times not too and I had this overwhelming feeling that I HAD to capture you at this age in the tub before this period of your childhood was gone forever. Like as if it would be gone the next day. I feel like as a parent we go through the motions of raising our children not really SEEING each moment because of the busyness of life and then all of a sudden you look at them and go, “Oh Sh*t!” where did my baby go!?! …….Aghhhh, here I go….another post that I’m going to sob through writing….. WHY is it so hard to watch you grow up!? Don’t get me wrong, I love watching you develop in each stage of your life and every new one I declare, “This is my favorite stage!” and I’m always so excited to see what the next stage will bring but when I think of losing the you in the previous stage, it kills me. To think that one day you won’t snuggle up to me on the couch because you’re too cool for that or that you’ll be too big for me to carry you on my hip or you won’t bust out in some crazy song and dance…….. aghhhh it breaks my heart! So I try to live fully in each moment every day as much as possible to take in as much of the snuggles, the crazy dances, the funny phrases,  the everything that is you right now before it’s gone because at 6 years old I feel like I’m slowly starting to lose grasp of this rope that is childhood. And as much as it may annoy you now, all these photos I take of you, it’s my way of forever holding on to you as a little girl, as my little girl. So I will continue to take millions of photos of you and one day, hopefully, you will thank me for it. Because as much as I want to continue to remember you as a child, one day you will want to be able to look back and see yourself as a child as well.

So here we are in the midst of this bath time photoshoot which I thought would last just a few clicks of my camera but no, you went into full model mode and totally rocked the camera. You are so funny with your posing. Yes, you posed yourself in all these shots, I gave very little direction but then again, your favorite part of getting your pictures taken has always been posing. (Hello Zoolander pose?!) You are literally the perfect photographer’s child. Hey, now that I think about it, I can’t wait for you to get older so you can help me on my photo shoots. Maybe you growing up isn’t so bad after all………but let’s just slow down a bit okay??