Mei Photography

Beyond the Toddler Stage

This incredible mama breastfed her kiddos for nearly a decade in total. Her story is one full of determination and resilience 💪🏼🩷

She was one of my main supporters in my own feeding journey. Her experience, knowledge and wonderful encouragement meant I was able to not only be confident with my own decision to feed beyond the toddler stage but to see it as something to celebrate. She’s the first person I spoke to when I came up with the idea of my Beyond Expectations project and she’s been a cheerleader ever since.

I’m always grateful to have such amazing people in my life. The ones who just “get it”. 🩷

Gorgeous

Inside and out.

This is the shoot I travelled the farthest for. Down to The Big Smoke for a dear friend’s Hen Do and the chance to meet and her 5 year old. This was his last feed and I’m so grateful to have them involved.

It was this Hello Gorgeous image that caught the attention of Visual Arts Coordinator, Helen from . A catalyst for the whole project.

Back to the Beginning

I started this project more than 3 years ago. This was only my second session and the images are still some of my favourites. The connection this mama has with her littles just shines through.

Luckily Perth is a small place and I’m fortunate that our paths have crossed frequently since we first met at the park. When you have kiddos roughly the same age, you tend to bump into each other a lot.

One of my favourite unintended outcomes of this project is how lovely it’s been to see so many of the families from my projects grow up and in some cases grow in number too.

During the exhibition, I knew it would be amazing to see the reaction of the mums involved but seeing their littles react to their images was really very special. Something I’m proud of and forever grateful for.



.mamma

🩷 Oxytocin 🩷

The scientist in me couldn’t resist the temptation to do this. The “love hormone”, oxytocin, is essential for bonding between humans. Especially parent & child. And the magic thing about breastfeeding is it increases levels of oxytocin which then helps increase milk production… giving us a neat little cycle of milky oxytocin bubbles.

Nature is incredible.

In this artwork you’ll find images of ALL the families who took part in my project to form a basic diagram of an Oxytocin molecule.