FRYday: Emily

Happy FRYday everyone! For those of you who asked for the full article from our Somerset Life magazine feature, we can finally share it! Here’s the full essay I had the opportunity to write if you’d like:

When we started Small Fry last Fall, we had no idea what would happen. We knew we had a supportive network of friends and family who would be on board, but would anyone else care? What would even talk about day in and day out? How fast would we run out of inspiration? What would it take to make time away from our family worth it? We decided to talk about it over dinner, because our best ideas come when we’ve got a fork in one hand and a pen in the other.

We tossed around ideas, and discussed one another’s talents and passions. Nicole, and amazing photographer, could turn our projects and recipes into something magazine worthy. Jenna with her design know-how and detail-oriented eye, could take our posts to the next level. Emily, with a passion for writing and words could give our ideas meaning and girth. While all those things were great and would certainly provide us with enough content to support a blog platform we just weren’t sold on it. Then that lightbulb moment hit. If we based all of our interests, passions, and talents around our number-one passion, our number-one priority — our families, our baby boys — then that would be a blog worth writing. 

We all had chills, tears filled our eyes, (tears still come when we talk about it to this day), and we knew that Small Fry wasn’t just an idea, but could be a reality.  If we did it the right way, it could be a way for us to help support our families, to start college funds, and to have wonderful opportunities. All while talking about our own kids? That was going to be easy! What parent can’t do that ad nauseam?

From there we wrote our mission, and signed it off and published it to our little blog with a readership of three: “We’ve been told this season of our lives is fleeting. What if we could say that we soaked it all in, let it envelope us, looked into those big beautiful eyes of our children every morning and said “let me show you something amazing today!”

Quickly we realized that our mission to celebrate parent and childhood was a worthy cause for more than just our blood relatives, and we found ourselves with an amazing and supportive readership.  We’ve had incredible highs with a week focused on adoption journeys, a viral YouTube video, partnerships with amazing companies, and so many loving and inspiring comments from readers around the world.  We have found that we need to consciously commit and recommit ourselves to our purpose and not let the gilded appeal of consumerism take over. We think our site is great, as we should, but we also see where we need to improve.  We stress and toil over our missteps and are pretty hard on ourselves. 

As a trio we’ve fought for our ideas — really fought, compromised, made up, wanted to quit, been proud, excited, surprised, laughed until we cried. We love and respect one another, we believe in ourselves and our endeavors, and that’s all that matters.  We have set the bar high for ourselves, but every day when someone, parent or not, comes to our space, leaves encouraging words, or says “I’m going to try that!: to something we’ve said, a photo we took, or and idea we had, that’s reason enough to keep up the pace.

There are also a lot of forces against us saying that parenthood is too hard, unglamorous, pedestrian even — and maybe it is.  But it is also magical, heart-wrenching, life-bettering, and world-shaking. It is simultaneously boring and cerebral, repetitive and pull-your-hair-out challenging, simple and complex.  It is quiet and calm, and everything all at once.  It is a tug on your pant leg and a stretch of your limits. And it is worth celebrating.

xoxo

Emily

Easter photos by Lindsey Orton 

Family Bugaboo photos by Cee Bee

all other photos by our lady Nicole.

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We have a guest DIY over on Inspired by This! Catch how to make these super easy initial Helvetica pillows here.

We’ve got the most insane week next week with a big event with Cricut and then the Alt Summit conference. We will be posting as usual, but wanted to let any Alt Summit attendees know where will be during the conference so we can meet!

We’ll be moderating a roundtable on Blog Ethics on both Thursday (4:30pm) and Friday (9:30am)! Then on Friday we’ll be hosting a take-home DIY in Cricut’s Craft Lounge at 10:30 am right after our roundtable. We’ll be sure to share pictures of all the fun (and hard work, too) when it’s all said and done, and follow along via Instagram @smallfryblog. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!