Sneak Peak - Family Photos

We had our family photos taken a few weeks ago. My sister took them for us on Thanksgiving morning and got some really cute pictures. Dare I admit that we have never had our family pictures taken professionally? We haven't. What's worse is that we've never even had Gavin's picture taken by a professional. As it turns out, we know a lot of people who enjoy taking photos and it seems that if you take enough, you're going to end up with at least a few good ones. Now, I won't say that I don't wish I could swap our heads out in some of our pics and take the best smiles of each of us from several different shots and combine them in one photo, but we can't all be perfect all the time, now can we? I also can't say that I didn't giggle at a few of them or laugh in embarrassment at some of them, but that's half the fun of it, isn't it?

For quite a while, Gavin would literally just run away at the sight of a camera, and more recently, would give us his weird little eye-rolled grouchy face, which he thought was hilarious. Somehow though, recently, he has learned to smile on cue. Sometimes it's a fake smile, but he giggles so easily, you can get a real laughing smile without too much effort... if you can keep him still, that is.

Our trick for these photos? Bribery. Yep, plain and simple bribery. "If you cooperate with the pictures and smile nice, you can have pumpkin pie after dinner!" Hey, it worked!

We'll have a few of the photos on our Christmas card (which I JUST ordered), so I don't want to give them all away here, but it sure was a fun photo shoot and the best part is that it was all in my parents' back yard, which makes these pics extra special to us. This is the place of all of my childhood memories, the place where I played army with my brother and sister, lump-jumped in the fairy swamp, completely covered several sets of clothing in swamp mud, built fairy homes and toad houses, climbed trees and built forts, raked leaves only so we could jump off the trailer and into the leaf pile, checked wood duck houses with my Dad only to find a nest of raccoons living in them, hung clothes out to dry on the clothesline with my Mom, weeded and picked the huge garden, played Moonlight Starlight with all of my brothers and sisters, caught fireflies, climbed the Old Oak Tree and claimed my branch in the Crab Apple Tree, raised geese, ducks, rabbits and chickens and even had a pet chicken Solomon who would perch on my shoulder, dug for buried treasure and found tiny ceramic tiles, swam in the mucky ponds, swung from weeping willow-branches, caught tadpoles, fish, frogs, salamanders and snapping turtles and tried to keep them all in my room. This is the Hundred-Acre Wood in Milne's stories of Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh. This is the Enchanted Forest, the fields of gold and green, the emerald city if you will. This is where my memories were made and I love that Gavin is making his own memories there with his cousins. I hope his life contains all of the wonder and magic and make-believe and pretend play and giggles and laughs and secrets and potions and old oak trees and mud pies and grass soups and dare-devil clubs and broken bike chains and tree forts and zip lines that my childhood is made of. I hope our home is a place where all of that can happen, and I am so glad that he gets to enjoy the place where it all happened for me.