3 Ways to Make Father's Day Special

This weekend is Father’s Day and we are looking forward to celebrating the men in our families who bring joy, laughter, and so much more to our lives. Today, we are rounding up ideas for how to make Father’s Day special.

All of these ideas can be adapted for social distancing, and we hope you enjoy making them a part of your Father’s Day Weekend.

Interview Dad

Give Dad (and Grandpa, and the other special men in your children's lives) a chance to tell some of his favorite stories.

Encourage your kids to conduct mini-interviews with the special guys in your family's life. This is a great thing to do even if you are celebrating Father's Day virtually. Set up a Zoom chat with Grandpa, call him on the phone, or send an email.

If Dad and the kids are in the same space, invite them to go outside in the backyard or on the front steps. Give them some time to chat. Help your child come up with interview questions to guide the conversation, and to create space to share stories, ideas, and special moments. Check out our Interview Storytelling Game for question suggestions, and invite your child to come up with some of their own!

Once the interview is complete, work with your child to come up with creative ways to put together what they learned about their special guy. Think about all of the different ways your child can use creativity to share stories. From PowerPoint presentations, to storybook style projects, to posters, there are so many ways to create keepsakes that commemorate dad's story.

Celebrate Your Memories

Rediscovering memories is a wonderful way to celebrate the dads in our lives. Carve out some time to sit down together and go over family photos.

Try to find photos from when your child was young, or before they were born. This is a great way to bring family stories to life, to rediscover some of your most special moment, and to find out what is most meaningful to dad. You may be surprised by what you learn.

Take the next step and memorialize these moments with a Father's Day Montage. We love creating unique montages like this for events and moments that are special to families. There are so many ways to bring these moments to life, to rekindle our memories, and to celebrate our stories.

What better way to honor your family's story - and your dad - than to create a time capsule like this, just for him.

Cook a Favorite Meal with Dad

So many of the dads we know love to spend time in the kitchen or out with the grill. Brainstorm a fun family meal with dad, then get to work creating it together.

Think about different themes and build a meal around them. Make decorations, try new recipes, and start celebrating right away. Cooking together gives your kids an opportunity to spend quality time with dad, and to feel proud and excited about creating something together that the whole family can enjoy.

Continuing Traditions

Here at Portraits that Move, we are grateful to be able to work in the face of Stay at Home Orders and the uncertainty that faces all of us. This time has been a reminder of the importance of resilience and the beauty of simple moments and family traditions.

We are so very grateful to the clients who continue to trust us to help honor their most important moments and to be a part of their celebrations and their traditions, even when those celebrations and traditions have had to change their shape. Even when Bar Mitzvah celebrations have been postponed, or moved to the virtual space.

Throughout all of this, it is becoming even more clear how special simple things like a truly beautiful, professionally edited Montage can be. Our montages provide so much more than a way to celebrate a child’s bar or bat mitzvah, or a way of celebrating milestones like birthdays, anniversaries, and retirements.

From sorting through pictures, to talking with clients, to working with our editors, to delivering the final film, we are able to give families what we all need now. And what we all realize is so important. We are able to highlight connections, remember quiet moments, cheer each other on, and embrace and celebrate who we are, and how very much we all mean to each other.

So, friends, we thank you. We thank you for your trust. We thank you for sharing your moments with us. And we thank you for helping us create, honor, and celebrate your stories.

To create a Mtizvah Montage, or a Milestone Montage for your family, contact us now. We can’t wait to help you share your story!

How Can We Possibly Celebrate?

Mother’s Day is this Sunday. Like all things of this moment, we are all a bit uncertain about how to celebrate it. We may even be wondering if it is ok to celebrate it. Is it ok to celebrate anything right now, in the midst of so much confusion, grief, and loss?

These are good questions to ask. Please, do not feel like you are doing all of this social distancing, home schooling, mothering through crisis, wrong. You are not. We are not. That is why all of us absolutely should be celebrating.

We need to celebrate the moments we have had with our families, the memories that carry us through difficult times, and those we are making right now. No matter how messy they are, no matter how much our plans fall apart. No matter how often we struggle, how much we worry, and how much we simply do not know. We must take a pause to practice gratitude, to find a bit of peace, and to honor our lives and the people in it.

Mother’s Day can be hard. That is not unique to mothering during a pandemic. It is true all the time. We suffer losses, disappointments, and separations throughout our lives. All of that feels even more present now, as we are all experiencing layers of this together.

A New Gift for a New Time

Here at Portraits that Move, we are offering a simple gift to you. For the first time, we are making Mother’s Day Montages available. This is a specially designed offering that allows us to work together digitally and quickly, to give you a gift to enjoy during this Mother’s Day that is unlike any other.

You can start the montage making process with us right now. Or, you can use this Mother’s Day Weekend to gather your photos together as a family, and we can deliver your video later in the month.

As our gift to you, we are offering a 20% discount for Mother’s Day Montages. Get started on your special gift now. Even though it is contact-less and digital, we promise to maintain our same level of connection and support throughout the process. We’ll be talking with you over email and by phone.

And we will be holding you in our hearts. Always.

Balancing Joy and Challenges

As difficult as all of this has been - and it seems the difficulty comes in waves - we find the greatest comfort comes in the moments we spend calmly and joyfully with the ones we love. And so, that is driving home even more, the importance of remembering and honoring the moments, big and small, with our families. The milestone moments that we can recall when things feel most difficult, and the every day moments that make up our family life and our shared history, are what we seem to crave the most.

We acknowledge that this time of social isolation is especially difficult for families who have spent a tremendous amount of time, energy, and love preparing for upcoming events like bar and bat mitzvahs. Suddenly, it feels like the months and years of dreaming, and planning, and working, are ripped away. The creativity, enthusiasm and strength that we are witnessing in the face of this disappointment (felt by children and parents in equal measure), is inspiring us to work harder and to do more.

Some families have used Zoom and other technology to host virtual bar mitzvah celebrations. Others are putting the party plans on hold and coming up with even more fun, creative ways to celebrate when we can finally all be together again to revel in our traditions, and our families. Sharing new stories, and re-telling all of our old favorites.

Along with our clients, we have been finding ourselves taking a little more time to pour over our own family memories. We have been bringing out photos, from physical photos to the longer and longer camera rolls on our phones and other devices. What we are finding - and we are hearing the same from clients and friends - is that looking back over these memories (even those from the recent past that is starting to feel a bit far away) is helping us to feel gratitude and joy. And this gratitude and joy helps to balance out, if not push away entirely, the frustration that current circumstances are often creating.

In fact, these small, isolated moments go a long way into helping us tell - and connect to - our family stories. If you have found yourself looking through photos and longing to connect to and celebrate your family , now is the perfect time to work with us on creating a Montage Video. Without the ability to shoot our Signature Portrait Videos or Mitzah Movies due to social distancing, our Portraits that Move Team has been hard at work on more montages. For families with a bar mitzvah coming up, now is an ideal time to get started on making a Mitzvah Montage with Portraits that Move. Everything from the initial consultation, to the Montage creation process, is easy to do virtually. And with a little extra time with your family, it is a good time to gather around and review photos, swap stories, and select your favorites to share.

In addition to our Mitzvah Montages, we have been creating new montage videos for birthday and retirement celebrations, and other events that families plan to hold virtually and in person. It fills us with joy to be able to be a part of sharing and celebrating your family’s story in this way, especially now. We invite you to reach out to us to plan a montage, or simply to share a story.

Wishing you good health and an abundance of joy.