In case you missed it, we had our twin boys Remington & Ryder on July 6th! It’s been a long Summer (the end of my pregnancy was pretty rough and my recovery from a c-section has been slow) but my boys will be two months old this Sunday! And in case you didn’t know, this is actually our second set of twin boys. Our older boys, Malachi & Micah will turn three in December.

Our fabulous friend Sarah took newborn photos of Malachi & Micah when they were born and they have been some of my favorite photos. So this time around we knew that we had to get her to do a newborn photo shoot again. And this week I just got all the photos back. (And if you want a little peek into what life really looks like with two sets of twin boys – scroll down to the last photo. Yeah.)

Some days are long and hard with 4 little kids all two and a half years and younger. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. God knew exactly what He was doing when He designed our family.

So here are some of the photos from our newborn photo shoot as well as the comparison’s with our first boys! I even got the same onesies with their names printed on them but in brown and green this time. Do you think any of them look alike? (Both sets of twins are fraternal by the way)

And yeah. See those nice, happy smiling faces above? That photo took about an hour to get. There were a lot of blood, sweat, and tears put into getting that photo. When Sarah sent back all of our photos, plus this one, I knew instantly I had to share it!

I put it on Instagram last week, and as I suspected, it really resonated with women. When I look at this beautiful photo shoot we got, it’s so easy for me to just pick the beautiful ones and remember the very difficult time it took getting these photos. But when YOU look at these beautiful photos, all you see is a happy smiling family – you don’t know the difficulty that went into it.

BUT, some days with little kids are just plain hard. We pushed our older boys past nap time trying to get photos of the newborns napping and by the time we tried to take a family photo (which is the picture I wanted the most), it was melt down city. Screaming, scrying, fighting, trying desperately to wiggle out of daddy’s hands.

This look you see right now is my husband asking what we should do and my response was to shut down and just say, “Fine. We can be done. I don’t need a family photo. It’s too hard!” My sweet husband that he is, ignored me and I am so thankful for that. He took the older boys into their room and they all emerged a few minutes later ready to take family photos.

And at last, we got a family photo of all 6 of us! Thank you Jason for sticking through the screaming and tears. And I just knew I needed to share that photo because too often all we see on Facebook and Instagram are the perfect, photoshopped pictures of the happy, smiling families.

And I’m here to tell you that for our family, that is certainly not always the case! But by God’s grace we make it through each day and each season of life – even when that season contains two two-year-olds and two two-month-olds!