Finding beauty and joy in your daily rituals and routines, Atlanta family photographer

Kaleen Enke July 3, 2025

“To love your days is to love your life.”

I’m always inspired by the ideas of James Clear (if you aren’t subscribed to his 3-2-1 newsletter you should be). When I came across what he had to say here (the last part especially), it resonated with why I feel so strongly about photographing the lives of families the way I do.

"Many people view their habits and routines as obstacles or, at the very least, obligations to get through. Making the morning coffee, driving your kids to the next activity, preparing the next meal-we often see our routines as chores to be completed.

But these are not moments to be dismissed. They are life. Making coffee can be a peaceful ritual-perhaps even a fulfilling one-if done with care rather than rushed to completion. It's about the amount of attention you devote to these simple moments, and whether you choose to appreciate them or bulldoze through them on the way to the next task.

Find the beauty and joy in your daily rituals and you will find beauty and joy in your daily life. To love your habits is to love your days, and to love your days is to love your life." - James Clear

Life with young kids can feel like it’s just work…all the time. When your days are a string of routines that lead you to bedtime with little time left for anything extra, it can feel really exhausting. It IS really exhausting. Maybe, if we can see that string of routines as being the point of it all—rather than a thing to get through so you can get on with other things—we will be able to see and feel more ease in our days.

And if your family is anything like my family, your routines still may not feel ease-y even with a mindset shift. But I promise, if you can have someone show you what it looks like, you will see that there is still beauty and joy in the way you tend to your family during those routines. I hope that by seeing your days you will come to love your days and in turn love your life. Cause even when the days feel messy and chaotic, there are opportunities for tender moments of connection within the daily routine.

Thanks to this family for reminding me to find the joy in shared rituals.

a baby wrapped in a towel is smiling and being held by his mom after a bath

a girl watches the news with a look of curiosity and uncertainty

5 Years Ago, Reflecting on the Pandemic, Atlanta Family Photographer

Kaleen Enke April 10, 2025

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 5 years since I was watching Frozen 2 while refreshing the news of the pandemic. Every time I hear the song, “All is Found,” I’m still reminded of that feeling in my gut when I started to realize this virus would affect our lives in significant ways. Honestly, it’s not unlike the uncertainty I feel from my current news refreshes. (“Is this really happening?”)

I took a lot of photos during the pandemic. I shared a photo story about my pandemic experience here, but I wanted to share more from my archive of that time. I don’t want to forget the toilet paper shortage or how we tried to keep each other safe with garbage bag hugs and homemade masks.

During the extended social distancing period, we spent a whole lot of time outside, chopping wood, clearing out our little Secret Garden, sunning on the deck. We celebrated birthdays and holidays outside. We played card games outside.

We navigated how to do school from home for the rest of the school year, and then I dusted off my teacher’s hat and hosted a pandemic pod for the following school year. You can see images of that experience here.

We traded tickets to Greece for old-fashioned feet-in-the-air airplane rides. We traveled up and down our street. We explored the parts of our yard that got buried when they decided to pave a giant highway back there 70 years ago. We toured our favorite neighborhood spots and discovered some new ones.

We had lots of time at home to lean into behavior challenges. At the time, I thought the challenges we were having were all my fault. I thought that I must be getting my parenting wrong because the effort I was putting in was not producing the outcomes I expected…it would be a few more years before we would start collecting the acronyms to help frame our experience…PANDAS/PANS, ADHD, ODD, Anxiety, Dyslexia…to name a few. I’m sure I’ll share more about all of that some time too.

I know everyone’s pandemic experience was different, and it’s not lost on me that we are fortunate to be able to look back on this time with relative fondness.

We got the time to be together. We had work. We made it work.

We got covid at some point. We got better.

We languished. We lived.

a young girl sits on a package of toilet paper playing a small pink guitar

a birds eye view of someone playing the pandemic board game

a girl pokes her pencil through a hole in her tights with a sad face because she doesn't want to do school at home during the pandemic

a birds eye view of school lunch on a table

3 children work on sewing up stuffed animals outside

a girl leans her head on a window and looks out

a child sits on a couch watching a computer for school during the pandemic

a child lies on a couch while two other children build with legos in front of a window with a rainbow painted on it

one child stands on a headboard and yells at two other children on the bed

kids look at their easter baskets outside

a child wears easter bunny ears and smiles at her dad while she swings with him

a girl hugs her grandma who is wearing a mask and garbage bag as protection from covidduring the pandemic

The Odd Pod, Photos from a Pandemic Pod

Kaleen Enke March 25, 2025

Fall 2020 - Spring 2021

When our local schools decided to stay virtual in the fall of 2020, a group of neighbors made a plan for their kids to join together as a pandemic pod. I was connected to them through a friend I used to teach with, and we decided we would do school together at my house. I would manage their virtual learning and care for them after the school day while their parents worked.

My hope for all of the kids was that we would be able to turn a strange and disappointing year into an opprotunity for creative and playful learning. I wanted to capitalize on the opportunities that the freedom of learning together in a small group at home created for individualized instruction, unstructured play time, sensory activities, art, and social emotional development.

Of course there were many struggles as we all learned how to do school on a computer. The kids were in two different districts, in several different grades, and had different schedules. The majority of the kids were kindergarteners who had limited practice using a computer. But it didn’t take too long before everyone was able to use a mouse, mute themselves on Zoom, and submit their assignments online. In addition, the kids got to learn from each other, negotiate a variety of social situations (including having a dog and a 3 year old in their classroom), and escape into their own imaginative worlds in between and after virtual school.

I had every intent to fully document this pandemic pod experience. But as it turned out, my hands were often too full for a camera and my mind too tasked to make interesting compositions. Still, I hope the images I could get tell a little bit of the story of how we spent our days together. I sincerely hope that some day these kids look back at this historical year with a glimmer of fondness for the time we had together.

a child sits in front of his computer screen on the first day of virtual school and is directed to have a moment of silence

a group of four boys dances to a song in a bedroom

children work on their school during the pandemic

two kids on two different virtual classes raise their hands to participate in their individual classes

children play in the creek during the pandemic

a child throws a ball for her virtual pe class while other students participate in their virtual classes

a picnic lunch with the pod during the pandemic

a girl puts her head through a big bubble

a child holds up a cray fish by a string