Breanna’s Twin Maternity Session | Fort Collins, Colorado

The cottonwoods at Riverbend Ponds are old. Older than most of Fort Collins, older than the trail that runs past them, older than any of us standing under them in our soft white dresses, pretending we know how to hold still. They’ve watched a lot of families. They’ve watched a lot of bellies. They’ve watched the kind of golden September light that turns the prairie grass into something you’d pay money for at an estate sale.

Breanna brought her whole world to this session — her husband, her almost-three-year-old daughter, two dogs who have opinions about being brushed before photos, and the two babies still on the inside. A maternity session with twins is not a still life. It’s a barely-contained organism. We followed the light around the pond until the sun started doing that thing it does in Northern Colorado in late summer, where it looks less like a sun and more like a memory of one.

If you’ve never been to Riverbend Ponds Natural Area in Fort Collins, it’s a quiet little ribbon of water tucked off Timberline. It’s not Instagrammed half to death. It’s not curated. It’s just willow and cottonwood and tall grass and a few people walking their dogs at dusk who pretend not to look. Which is exactly the kind of place I want to put a family who is about to double in size.
Big sis stole the entire session. She kissed the belly. She held her mom’s hand into the water. She looked up at her mom like she had questions she hadn’t figured out how to ask yet, which, of course, she does. There are two more humans about to share her parents and her dogs and her dinner table. The look on her face is the whole reason we shoot maternity sessions outside, in good light, while there is still time.

If you’re pregnant in Fort Collins or Boulder or anywhere on the Front Range and you’ve been quietly wondering whether to do this, do it. Bring the dogs. Bring the toddler. Bring the husband who will pretend not to want to be in any of the pictures and then end up in all of his favorites. The babies don’t stay babies, and the cottonwoods don’t stand forever, and the light at Riverbend Ponds in September is the closest thing this town has to a small miracle.

P.S. If you’d like to plan your own maternity session in Fort Collins, Boulder, or anywhere along the Northern Colorado Front Range, I’d love to walk through it with you. Sunshine Lady Photography books a small handful of sessions each season — the goal is always the same, to make a few photographs you’ll still want on your wall in twenty years.