Our fifth wedding anniversary was always going to be a strange one. Five years sounds significant but not quite enough to throw a party, and we had spent the previous two of those years deep in the trenches of new parenthood. Sarah and I are both fairly practical people. Neither of us wear much jewellery. Neither of us really cared about flowers. The thought of going out to a fancy restaurant when neither of us could remember the last time we had finished a sentence without being interrupted made both of us tired.
But it felt wrong to do nothing. Five years was the year we became three. Five years included the lockdown and Sarah's mum's illness and the worst house move of our lives and the night I drove our daughter Mia to the hospital at two in the morning with what turned out to be a febrile seizure that, thank god, lasted only a minute. Five years was a lot. We wanted something that said so.
The photo we kept coming back to
About six weeks before the anniversary, Sarah was going through her camera roll on a Saturday morning and she stopped on a photo from the autumn before. The three of us at Sauvie Island, at one of those big pumpkin patches an hour out of Portland. Mia was two and she was sitting on top of a pumpkin nearly as tall as she was, with her little brown boots dangling, holding a smaller pumpkin in her lap like it was a baby. Sarah was crouched on one side and I was crouched on the other and we were both looking at her, not the camera. The light was that low golden October light that makes everything look like a film still.
We had it on our phones. We had even printed it once, in a six by four, and stuck it on the fridge. But it was a phone snap, and printed at any decent size it looked exactly like what it was, a phone snap. The composition was nice but the resolution was not there. Neither of us wanted a giant slightly fuzzy photograph on the wall.
Why we picked storybook
I had bookmarked FrameArto a few months earlier after seeing one of their ads, a cute illustrated family portrait that came up on Instagram while I was scrolling at three in the morning during a feed. I sent the link to Sarah and we started clicking through the styles together. We discounted the oil paintings (too formal for the kind of house we live in), the watercolours (too soft, we wanted something with a bit of energy in it), the line art (we liked it but did not love it), and the cartoon styles (we wanted something with warmth, not punchlines).
The storybook family illustration style was the one that made both of us go, oh, yes. It looked like the inside cover of one of Mia's favourite books, all soft textures and gentle expressions, with the kind of slightly hand-drawn quality that makes you want to live inside it. We could already imagine our pumpkin patch photo translated into that style. We uploaded it that night.
We wanted the wall behind our front door to feel like home the second you opened it. Now it does. Mia points at her own face on the wall every time she walks past.
The iterations
The first round of three previews came back within a couple of minutes. Two of them were beautiful. The third, in our opinion, was a bit too smooth, Mia looked closer to four than two, and the pumpkin patch background had ended up looking more like an indoor stage set. Sarah used one of the free retries and asked for warmer light and a bit more illustrated texture. The second round was much closer. We picked our favourite of the three, the one where you could actually see the autumn dust hanging in the light.
I will say, it is worth knowing that you get those retries included. We are the kind of people who like to consider every option, and the ability to try again without feeling like we were being charged each time made the whole process feel like a collaboration rather than a transaction. It is also worth saying that the support email replied to a question I sent at 11pm on a Tuesday by 7am the next morning, which surprised me. They were thoughtful about it. They asked about the room we were hanging it in.
Anniversary day
We had agreed no big gifts, so I picked up the canvas from the porch on the day it arrived and hid it in the garage under a blanket for a week. On the morning of our anniversary I got up before Sarah and Mia, brought it inside, and propped it on the kitchen counter against the kettle. When Sarah came down with Mia on her hip she stopped dead in the doorway and her free hand went to her mouth. Mia looked from the canvas to us and back again and just said, "mama," and pointed.
It hangs now above the console table in our entryway. The first thing you see when you open the front door. The first thing Mia looks for in the morning, the first thing I look at coming home from work. It is the kind of thing our daughter will fight her brother for in thirty years (we are expecting one, due in March). That is how we knew it was right. Not the size of the canvas. Not the price. The fact that one day, our kids will both want it.
A note for other parents considering this. The photo does not need to be perfect. Ours had a stranger half in shot on the left edge, a bit of motion blur on Mia's hand, and Sarah's hair was doing something unfortunate in the wind. The illustration kept what mattered and softened what did not. Trust the style to do its job, and pick the photo for the moment, not the technical quality. That is the advice I would give anyone.
“It is the kind of thing our daughter will fight her brother for in thirty years. That is how we knew it was right.”
The Novak Family, Portland, Oregon
