A beautiful maternity shoot in the water at Malibu! Carefree and expectant, this shoot captures the essence of the joy of preparing for your first child!
What’s your favorite family pastime together?
We love to play board games together. It helps us really engage with each other and be present. One game we like to play in particular is Monopoly Deal. It’s a much faster-paced game than the traditional Monopoly board game, so it requires a lot of attention. You can win or lose in the blink of an eye! It can get cutthroat because we’re both pretty competitive and that’s a huge part of what makes this game fun for us. When we play Monopoly Deal, we get to employ all sorts of strategies and really get to showcase our individual strengths. When we play together, it’s like we get the chance to wow each other and remind each other just how brilliant the both of us can be. With all the responsibilities that come with having a family, working, and keeping a home together, it can be pretty easy for us to just get bogged down, but making the time to play board games together really gives us that opportunity to remember why we chose to be on this journey together as a family in the first place and why we keep choosing each other every day.
Any lessons you learned as a family through the last year?
This past year we’ve been pregnant with our first kid. That was definitely a huge transition for us. We’ve built this pretty full life together as a couple with our two dogs, and our ever-growing circle of friends and family, and now we’re making even more room in our lives for this little baby boy (and trying to renovate our primary bathroom at the same time). We’ve learned that as busy as we are, we are still willing and able to make time for each other. It’s like time has become way more precious to us. We really try to take in and appreciate every second we’re given.
What does family mean to you?
Family means love, safety, and a future. To us, family counts more than just the people with whom you’re genetically related. Family is built up of all the people with whom you build happy memories, share dumb little secrets, and make grand plans for world domination (like installing ziplines that take you everywhere you need to go for some reason). Family is connection. It’s everything.
What have you recently done to put family as a major focus in your life?
Well, one way family has become a major focus in our lives is by welcoming our first child into the world. It was no small decision by any means. We both work full-time while also maintaining a pretty full social calendar, so between all that and maintaining our marriage and our seemingly full house with our two dogs, throwing a child into all that was most definitely a big decision. One we always knew we would commit to, but never really knew when. So when Andrew sent me a Google calendar invite a couple years back to start trying for a dragon baby last year, I had a HUGE laugh. After I realized he was being half-serious, I took a moment to stop laughing and we were able to come to a compromise where we agreed to start trying in late November instead of early May, and lo and behold here we are about to welcome a bouncing baby boy into the Tuadi+Pang Family. It’s a huge mind-shift. Suddenly, getting ahead at work or hanging out with your friends and figuring out what you’re going to do over the weekend aren’t the biggest things on your plate. Not by a long shot. Instead, the focus is how will I keep this little person alive? How will I make sure they know they’re loved? Needless to say, our weekends look a little different now. Our chore list has gotten longer while getting the house ready for the baby, but every day feels like an accomplishment.
If you had one piece of advice for other families, what would it be?
One piece of advice we would share with other families is to take the time to really try to see each other with clear eyes and accept each other for the multifaceted people each of us are. We all have different wants, needs, and expectations. And when the people closest to us fail to know and meet those wants, needs, and expectations, it can be hard not to resent them. But it’s important to remember that they (hopefully) aren’t intentionally being obtuse and that if you feel your wants, needs, and expectations aren’t being met, you should just talk to them. Otherwise, you risk falling into a cycle of resentment, self-pity, and isolation.
Likewise, if someone if communicating with you their wants, needs, and expectations, it’s your turn to listen and understand. You can’t brush it off as a passing feeling. Odds are it took that person a lot of deliberation and courage to talk to you about these things in the first place, so it’s your job to honor that.
As family members, it can be second nature to expect the best out of each other but you also have to face reality, to meet people where they’re at, and give each other the grace and patience to get where you want to be. Nobody is perfect, but as long as you keep communicating with each other, you’re at least one step closer to being in harmony with each other
Photography & Videography / Spin the Dial Films / www.spinthedialfilms.com / @spinthedialfilms
Publisher at The White Wren and Bajan Wed, Award Winning Photography + Videographer at Live View Studios, Dad, 80s music lover, crunchy health advocate
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