Tell us about your family! How many of you are there? How do you like to spend your weekends? Do you like to travel?
We are a little tribe of four. Two very proud parents and our beautiful little boys - Jed who is 4 and Harris, who is 2. With two busy boys our weekends are usually full of adventure – sometimes that means getting away for the weekend and seeing new places, sometimes it means finding adventures literally in our backyard! We both work full time, so our weekends are precious to us – we like to make sure they’re full of really rich time with the boys, and with each other. I think it is safe to say that yes, we like to travel. After family, travel is the most important thing in our world. I’ve always had a bit of wanderlust (ok, maybe a lot) – and that only intensified when the kids arrived, I wanted them to experience new things and new places. The boys both went on their first ‘holiday’ at around 12 weeks old had. They are incredibly lucky to have had the opportunities and experiences they've had and we make sure they understand that.
What’s your top tip for parents planning a getaway with little ones? Do you travel often as a family?
We are very fortunate to be able to travel regularly. Jed has been to I think 13 countries in 4 years, and Harris is at about 7 countries. And we’ve also been lucky enough to explore a lot of Australia. I do a lot of planning when we travel – and our travel now is significantly different to before the kids! We try to stay places where there will either be other kids for the boys to play with, or where there are parks/playgrounds/water parks etc around. The one thing I always say to people who ask us about travelling with kids is to not be afraid of it!! Our kids have been travelling since they were very young, and for the most part – they handle the long flights, the jet lag and the different cultures better than we do.
What took you to both New York and Hawaii? Were these holidays to mark something special, or just to get away with your family?
New York is a bit of a funny story. Jed had a book about New York, about the architecture in the city and all of the buildings. He developed what I would probably call an obsession with NYC until we read books about the city every night, and he had so many questions about the city: Where was it? What was it like there? Did kids live there? Were the buildings really that big? Did Central Park have a playground in it? We were talking about having an away Christmas, and asked Jed if he would like to go to NY for Christmas. He said yes, so off we went! Hawaii was just a getaway – it is really rare in our world that we have the ability to just spend time together as a family.
You have now done two Travelshoots with us! Tell us what you thought of the experience in both New York & Honolulu.
I am a HUGE fan of photos – our home is full of memories from our adventures, at home and on our trips. But when we are away, it is nearly impossible to get a good picture of all four of us. New York was a special trip for us, a trip like that isn’t going to be something we do regularly – so we wanted to have something other than a big apple keyring to remember the trip by! The pictures from NY are amazing: Brooklyn is one of my favourite places and we spent an hour there , on an absolutely freezing December morning, capturing us just being us. None of us are great at super posed photos, and when we mentioned that to the photographer – he looked relieved, and he then just snapped away as we hung out (under the Brooklyn Bridge, as you do!).
Honolulu was really similar. Our photographer was amazing. She made the kids really comfortable by chatting directly to them, making them laugh, and then she just did her thing while we were laughing at each other. The photos are iconic in terms of the location, without being gaudy and tacky. They’re ‘family portraits’ without any of that awkward family portrait vibe. The biggest challenge has been choosing which of the photos to display at home!
What would be your advice to a family thinking about booking a shoot?
Look back through the photos from the last holiday you took as a family – and see how many pictures you have of the whole family together. If other families are anything like us, we’d have hundreds of pics of the kids, and maybe one or two from a month long holiday of the four of us – and they were usually selfies! It takes an hour out of your holiday, the photographers know the best spots and have great local knowledge, and you’ll have beautiful memories to last forever. The shoots also make great gifts – our shoot in NY was our family Christmas gift. And we get to look at them every day!
