#reallifemama

My friend Selena of Le Petit Rêve has started up a pretty fantastic series that I wanted to share with you guys today.

It's called Real Mama Life inspired by this post Shauna Niequist wrote over at Relevant Magazine semi-recently. Shauna talks about how we should all stop Instagramming our perfect lives and share the real moments instead. Stop feeling like you have to stage everything to be just so and go ahead and snap that photo with the pile of laundry in the background or your crazy morning hair anyway, because that's real life and it's beautiful. This is what Selena is hoping to encourage with her new series (read more about it here) and I'm all about it.

I like pretty pictures and staging as much as the next person (uhhh...hello...I am a stylist after all...it's engrained in my nature), but that doesn't mean that everything always has to be perfect. I am totally guilty of staging photos with Fern in cute outfits on days when she's been in crusty leggings with a booger-face all day long. Or snapping shots of her in the one clean spot in our house, while piles of mess lurk just outside of the photo's frame. I think that's totally OK to do sometimes, but I also think that doing this all the time is going to result in us looking back at our lives one day through pictures and realizing that it all looks a little too perfect and not so much like how the story really happened. There is beauty in the reality of our stories and that is the story that I want to tell and remember. Sure I want to see some cute staged photos sprinkled in there too, but I want to try to share more real moments.

So...basically...if you want to join in, you can share your "Real Mama Life" moments via your blog, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. using the hashtag #realmamalife and then link up over at Le Petit Rêve every Monday so we can all enjoy a good dose of reality and a breath of fresh air...a reminder that none of us are perfect and we're all in this together.

My Real Life Mama Monday moment that I wanted to share this week was this shot from dinner with friends this weekend:

My friend Becca snapped it and I love that it perfectly captured what most meals out with little ones are like. Everyone is wrangling and feeding kids while sneaking in fragmented bits of conversation and taking shifts to eat. There is usually whining at some point and there are definitely messes and dinners commence by 5:00 PM (old people style) and everyone breaks up to head home for bedtimes before 8:00 PM (the witching hour).

The thing I love most about this photo is that when I look at it, it really makes me feel like a parent. I remember going out to meals with Chris and Becca in the pre-kid days when they just had Bennett and Craig and I were childless and not understanding why they couldn't hang out longer or why they wouldn't want to go to certain restaurants or why they had to eat in shifts. I remember thinking that so many of the things that my friends with kids did were weird. But, now that I'm a parent, I can just laugh about it, because now I'm "that parent" and I do a ton of those things that I thought were weird. I guess it's kind of unavoidable and in an odd way I kind of love it. It makes me feel like I've matured and figured out some things about life and like I've really settled into my role as a mama...it kind of makes me proud in a strange way. Not sure if that makes sense at all.

But, there you have it. A little dose of reality for your week!

If you want to join in, check out all the details over at Le Petit Rêve!

xo

Lauren