Joanna Gaines captured the perfect photo of father-son bonding
Sometimes the stillest moments are the sweetest.
Take a look at many parents’ camera rolls and you’ll likely find a gallery full of face-paced action and unremarkable practicality.
You’ll see shaky video clips of kids running across a soccer field, blurry photos that didn’t quite catch that cute toddler moment in time, screenshots of grocery lists or pictures of random items to be texted to a partner. ( Are these the diapers you want? Can you buy more of these wipes on the way home? )
So many of the pictures we snap are about conveying information to our partners or sharing a moment in our child’s day that they missed. But it’s also important to hold on to the moments when they were there. When we’re not trying to get a clear action shot, but just focus on love.
Joanna Gaines understands the impulse to reach for the camera in these moments of stillness, and she just shared a picture-perfect moment on Instagram.
“Walked into this cuddlefest and my heart almost burst,” she captioned the photo of her husband, Chip, resting with their infant son, Crew, and his big brother, 9-year-old Duke.
When our days are spent carpooling and chasing our children around and our nights are spent getting far too little sleep, it’s so easy for everything to become a blur. That’s why moments like the one Gaines shared are so impactful.
When everyone is still, we can focus. We can see our partner’s love for our kids with crystal clarity. As Jo noted, the moments of quiet realization are enough to make a mama’s heart explode.
Mamas like Jo are often the ones behind the camera, capturing their partner and the kids, but it’s also important for us to get in front of the lens once in awhile. Another celebrity mother, Pink, took note of this in January , when she captioned a father-son moment in her family with a very relatable request.
“I hope one of [Carey’s] resolutions is to photograph his wife more . Just so people know I exist,” she wrote.
We should all try to get more photos of the partners we love and the families that we made together. Photos of the quiet moments, not just the soccer games and ballet recitals—and not just photos of the kids. We matter, too, and so do our partners.
As parents, our camera rolls and our days are often filled with more moments of chaos than calm, so when the person you love is sharing a sweet, quiet moment with the children you both love, that’s an image really worth holding on to.
Thanks for the reminder, Jo.