Now something that has not yet leaked into the internet realm as of yet is his name.  It was something we thought a lot about, as I’m sure all parents do.  We wanted it to have meaning, serve as an account of his legacy, and be given with purpose.  To top it off, it needed to be different to pacify his parents’ inner creatives. :0)  We introduce to you Seven Patrick Daniel McLellan.

For those of you who don’t know, Seven was the name of our first son who passed away.  We decided to name him after his older brother so that his memory would be sure to stay with us always and his life would always be acknowledged.  Patrick is Sean’s middle name and SP are also his initials so without making him an outright junior, he is named for his father and can be “mini-SP” for his grandparents.  Daniel is my maternal grandfather’s last name and my paternal grandfather’s first name which made it terribly convenient for us to be able to name him in honor of both of these incredible men with one name.  Finally, McLellan is our last name so of course you would assume it’s just his by default, but what you might not know is that there’s no actual reason for Sean to have been a McLellan at all.  He was given his mother’s stepdad’s last name – the name of a man who would go on to be his father and grandfather when he certainly didn’t have to be.  We are all so proud to take his name and have his legacy continue through our son.  So there you have it. :0)  This is our Seven – incidentally, born in room 7, on the 26th of the month – a day later in the month than the day his brother was born (November 25th).  The page has officially turned and life moves forward with joy at last.

Thank you so much for all the outpouring of love you’ve shown us, through our struggles and our triumphs in the past year and a half.  We have received such amazing support, encouragement, comfort and help.  Thank you especially for all you’ve given us over the past few days.  We have amazing friends and family, and your support has been better than anything we could have asked for.   It made us smile to see all the encouraging comments all over Twitter and Facebook before and after his safe arrival.  It was hilarious to discover that our son had his own Twitter hashtag (#McLellanBaby)!–and it was amazing to see that within hours there had been over 1000 views of the first image of Seven that Mel posted from her iPhone

A HUGE thanks to one of our closest friends, Jen Bebb, for flying in all the way from Vancouver, Canada to be there for us, and to photograph our first few moments with our baby.  We’ll share some of those later on, after we get to see them!

The moment you think you’ve come far enough and become stagnant, you WILL be left behind. Make sure that no matter how busy you get, you always make time to stay ahead of the curve. Amazing advances are happening in our industry right now, and there are new people getting into it all the time. One advantage new photographers have is plenty of time to be looking at the latest and greatest. Why? Because they don’t have a big backlog of work built up.

Set aside time to always continue educating yourself. Put it on your to-do list and calendar. Once that time is on the calendar, don’t push it back because other things come up. Innovating may not seem important at the time, but it will seem really important if you don’t do it. You’ll come to realize that things have advanced so far so fast that you don’t even know where to begin and will feel like giving up before you even start. Don’t let this happen to you!

What are some ways you can keep learning today? Assess your strengths and weaknesses and determine the areas you’d like to focus on. Then, take a look around to see what avenues you can use to improve. Workshops, conventions, forums, webinars, and educational blogs are a great place to start. Give yourself an allotted time every week whether it be 30 minutes or a few hours. Some tools are free and some you pay for; but something that is always free is practice! So you’re not good at shooting in harsh lighting conditions – grab a friend and practice in the harshest light you can find. Find a technique you’d like to implement on an educational blog and try it out. Search out threads on forums where people are talking about topics that are of interest to you. Engage, take initiative, and make things happen! There are many ways to stretch yourself and learn at your own pace, with the time you have at hand. The main thing is this: Get out there and do it.

So—what are you waiting for?

Taking it one step further, here is my biggest conviction from that conversation (can you relate?): we are so careful to back up and re-back up our clients images, but not our own. They’re on our computers here at our house and if someone were to break in and steal those computers, or if a fire claimed our office, all of our personal photos would be gone.  I’m working on changing that right now as we move a copy of all our personal images off-site to be stored with our client images.  This is so important!  If you don’t have a company for off-site storage, at least burn a dvd of your images and take them to a family member’s house.  You just never know and we are the custodians of our children and grandchildren’s memories.  It’s time that we take that to heart.

As our files from the last several years begin their move to off-site locations, here are the most recent images we’ve taken for our children and grandchildren.  I hadn’t really planned to do much with this stage in our life.  After all, I was just pregnant and we know what that looks like.  I don’t really feel like I need another picture of me in this state, but this is for our son and his children, so that they can glimpse back into this insignificant moment in our life and hopefully know us a little better for it.

They’ll know a little better just how much we loved him before he was even born and how much we anticipated his arrival into our lives…

They’ll remember how much new gadgets, like a new remote shutter trigger, fascinate Sean and how funny he can be. :0)

They’ll see how I humored him and those gadgets…

…until I didn’t ;0)

They’ll glimpse the younger selves of their elders, who we are as a couple, and hopefully still see some of this in us all those years later.

Most importantly, we hope that they’ll see love and remember us for it.

We are the custodians of our children and grandchildren’s memories – of their heritage.  No matter how insignificant our life’s moments may seem to us, I plan to move forward both documenting it and preserving it well.  We hope you’ll do the same.