Thankful 2025 | Jaye McLaughlin Photography

This year marks the SIXTEENTH annual Thankful Video.  For sixteen years, I’ve been doing what I love to do, telling your stories and hanging out with you and your beautiful kids. I’ve been taking photos of my own four kiddos all the while – I included a fun Before and After of them in this year’s slideshow, in fact. (Could I be getting old? Who are those grown-looking humans in the last slide? How is this possible?) They sure do look different, but I can easily zap myself into either of the moments of those photos. My freeze ray magic makes it so.

Rather than gush as I usually do over how grateful I am that you invite me into your homes and trust me year after year with your stories (I really, really AM grateful), I’m going to share a wish that I recently found while reviewing my old Thankful posts:

I wish you all the joy in these photos — forever. May you re-live these moments of love and happiness whenever you look at them.

A quick note on why it has to be that song (no matter what memories of the nineties that song may bring back for you). I want you to imagine me in my Iden Avenue kitchen in the early 2000s with a baby on my hip and a couple of toddlers at knee level. It’s the witching hour and I’m using my tried and true trick to keep everyone distracted and happy for the final countdown of the day — I’ve put on the happy dance playlist and we’re dancing through it. This song comes on, and with it that familiar line that contains what will eventually become the tag line of my business:

Wherever time may take you
in your life,
remember this was beautiful.”

The Pat McGuire Band, You’re So Beautiful

My business was born because that line made me tear up every single time I heard it. Babies and toddlers (and kids of all ages, if I’m honest!) can be hard, and it’s easy to allow coping with the chaos to distract from paying attention and remembering. Photos helped me remember. They still do.

If you’re a sentimental sucker like me, you can see last year’s Thankful Slideshow HERE and you can literally keep scrolling back sixteen years to the beginning.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your families. And, one more time, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!

Thanks for looking,

~Jaye