Family Photo Session

The sad truth: the last time our little family was photographed together was Christmas...of 2006...when Clara was six days old. Bad, bad us. Oliver heard through one of his classmates about an amateur photographer who is working to build a business and charges really reasonable rates (important for those of us on a student budget). So we decided to call her up and schedule a session a couple of weeks ago.

Rarely have I been so exhausted as I was by the end of that session.

But don't you just have to sit there and smile and look pretty while someone else does all the work, you ask? Well, in a normal family that may be the case. But normal families do not have a Clara to contend with. The child hates - HATES - to be confined against her will and makes her discontent very clear. Occasionally she'll sit nicely on your lap, but those moments are rare, especially when there is new territory to explore (and most particularly if that new territory is outdoors).

We got the pictures back this week, and I'm posting a few with some description as to what was going on in each. Hopefully the reason for my exhaustion will become clear.

The session began with the photographer attempting some traditional posed family portraits. This did not go over well with the little one. As soon as one of us would grab her to put her on our laps she would scream and try to wriggle away. This picture was taken immediately before a successful escape; you can see the indignation on her face:


Here we have Oliver attempting to wrestle with her a bit to see if we could get her happy enough to sit for a couple of shots. Sadly, this was not to be:


Finally, the photographer decided to try for some candid shots and then return to the posed shots once Clara had expended some of her excess energy. We can always hope, right? (I'm sure those of you who have spent time with my daughter are laughing right now.) We did end up with some cute candid shots, though:






After a few more attempts at some posed shots, we finally stumbled on the magic formula for taking photographs with our daughter. We just had to play together and would freeze for the camera on occasion. Oliver would run at me with Clara in his arms, we would turn and smile, and hope that the photographer could capture the shot in the brief moment that Clara would smile before she insisted on getting down. Or we had to hide from the photographer behind a tree and pop out to surprise her while she took the picture. This was the trick to finally getting everyone smiling together:


So after over an hour of running, wrestling, tossing, chasing, hiding, and falling, I was wiped out (keep in mind that I'm also a pregnant lady). But I am very glad that we finally have some pictures of us all together; as the main camera-wielder in the house I have been conspicuously absent from most photos for the past two years.

I think we might wait another year before we do this again, though.