It’s here! So excited to finally share this beautiful book project from Tracey Clark with you!

In her new book Elevate the Everyday: A Photographic Guide to Picturing Motherhood, Tracey manages to combine her years of photography expertise with amazing and practical tips for capturing the journey of motherhood. The book is not only gorgeous, helpful, and insanely inspiring, but it’s also full of several must-read stories of motherhood — her own and those of many of the mom writers and bloggers you know and love. I am beyond honored to have my own story included in the book.

Take a look!

Beautiful, right?

And yippeee! Here’s my story “Migration”:

Read an excerpt:

Migration

By Sheri Reed

While staring out the front window into a bleak February morning, birds entered my life.

My five-year-old suddenly set down his toys and wholeheartedly gasped “Beautiful!” and I looked up to see a window full of birds. Dozens of robins dropped down like fiery orange comets into the stripped winter trees next door. My boys—my oldest newly five and my youngest a few months past his first birthday—and we ran, window to window, hands and noses pressed to glass to take in the magic. On this day, the migration of many things was made loud and clear. Birds … yes, birds, I thought, grabbing my camera, so unexpectedly inspired. I began to look up for the everyday beauty of their passing show.

A few years after my first son was born, I ran into an old friend, deeply immersed in the early weeks of new motherhood. Mostly she shared the profound goodness: smallness, amazement, and beauty, all which cause a mother’s heart to come undone. In fact, it wasn’t until we were saying goodbye that, heart and eyes overflowing, she stopped me and told me that parenthood was so much harder than she ever imagined.

She looked in my eyes and asked, “Were you scared?”

“Yes,” I answered. “To death.”

What I did not say was that I was still scared. Scared I’d never survive toddlerhood, scared I could never be enough, and maybe more than anything, scared I would never be able to fill the growing void that feeling like “just a mother” left inside me.

Once the robins cracked something open in me, I began to take the boys “drive-by nature gazing trips” along the driving route of a nearby wildlife preserve. A few visits quickly became several trips a week and frantic dashes to catch the “golden hour” before sunset. Those days out there, chasing bird glimpses along the dusty roads, saved me — from boredom, from loneliness, from feeling stuck, from the debilitating heaviness of creative stagnation, and ultimately from forgetting who I was. Boys tucked in carseats, the natural world passing us by, I began to feel like myself, most certainly a new self, but my own true self nonetheless.

….

Read more in the book: Elevate the Everyday: A Photographic Guide to Picturing Motherhood,