I am real tree girl through and through. I have always grown up with real Christmas trees, usually something like a Douglas Fir. The smells and the tradition of cutting down a fir tree have a special place in my heart and in my childhood memories.

Last year, we had a tough time finding a tree, it was expensive, the u-cut trees were sold out early, and our tree lost a lot of needles early on. My husband has been begging me to get an artificial tree for years, and so after Christmas last year, I caved. We bought a beautiful artificial tree, and this year we used it for the first time. And I don't hate it. In fact, I bought a second one for the family room. And some pine scented spray to make it seem somewhat real. 

I still wanted the tree farm experience (and photos ;) ), so we loaded up the kids the weekend after we had our third baby and headed to the tree farm. We had the whole tree farm to ourselves, and the owners were gracious enough to just let us play among the trees. It's one of my favorite Christmas memories we've made with the kids. We played hide-and-seek, my oldest made me take a photo of her with every tree that was her height,  and we started the tradition of buying a potted pine tree to put outside and to plant in our yard after Christmas. 

I'm a stickler for traditions, but sometimes when old traditions are broken, beautiful new traditions are made. 

This month's Share Six theme is {Collections}.

I toyed with the idea of posting about different collections of things we have in our house, how my husband collects autographs to place in his man cave, or how my daughter loves collecting rocks and will often pick up rocks from people's driveways or in parks because they're "special rocks." Or how I recently found a drawer in an end table with random bits of odds and ends that my daughter has deemed special things.

But I love the idea of having a collection of images that fit into a recurring theme. Often you will find these collections using hashtags on Instagram. A photographer notices they have been taking similar photos on a regular basis, and so they make it a theme. The first time I saw this was the incredible @lauries_little_ones and her #xander_bythewindow_ theme, where she photographed her son asleep in his crib next to a window. It's beautiful to watch him grow and his sweet sleeping patterns. She also has hashtags for #frontdoor_portrait and #backdoor_portrait. The fabulously talented Meg Loeks or @meg_nlo who has a series titled #chroniclesofjuni for her majestic St. Bernard named Juni, and also #ArchieFromAbove to share bird's eye view images of her son Archie.

And so when we bought this enormous bunny chair for my daughter's first birthday, I knew I had to make a hashtag series, or collection, from it. I noticed I was taking A LOT of photos with this chair, one because it was a novelty and the kids were interested in it, but also because the nursery gets the best light in the house (when there's not an air conditioning unit in the window....hurry Fall, so we can get this air conditioner out!). So I titled the series #BabyJo_andthebunnychair, although I haven't done anything recently with it because Baby Jo is incredibly active now and won't sit long in the bunny chair. But maybe with the new baby, that's where I'll do her weekly photos or something and make a new series from it.

This month's Share Six theme is {Artificial Light}.

I think sometimes artificial light gets misinterpreted as strictly camera flash, but it can be so much more than that. I am very much a natural light photographer and haven't touched my flash since I shot weddings many moons ago, so I am way out of practice and was never much good with flash to begin with. I used to use flash when photographing our oldest daughter as a baby because our house can get pretty dark, but after a while I learned that I preferred finding the shadows and highlights and moody, low light images after all. Still, this theme helped me get out of my rut of the same types of images and practice with artificial light. I think it's always good to stray from your typical style once in a while to experiment.