This has been one of those weeks where none of the pictures I took really turned out that good. Mandy still doesn’t do much worth photographing, and Sam has developed a strange new antagonism towards the whole picture taking process …or so I thought. Apparently it’s just me, because only the first four photos in this update were taken by me; the rest –the good ones– were taken by a complete stranger.
Earlier in the week Geralyn had mentioned that she was taking the kids to one of those department store photo studios. I think my exact response to this bit of news was “Mrmpfh,” mainly because we’ve had lackluster experiences with these kinds of places before. As far as I expected, some bored, minimally competent “photographer” would half heatedly wave a threadbare stuffed animal and capture Samantha’s resulting expressions of fear, annoyance, and bamboozlement. We’d get maybe one good shot out of the bunch due to various laws of statistics, but the bizarre packages the studio hoisted on us would require us to buy four hundred wallet-sized shots of Sam looking like she was either extremely constipated or extremely scared or both.
This time, though, apparently the person behind the camera knew what she was doing, because we got a some great shots which I’ve scattered throughout this post. I’m quite pissed at how good some of these look. When I try to take Sam’s picture lately I can rarely get her to unplug her finger from whichever of her head’s various holes she has it jammed in, much less look at the camera and smile. But somehow the photographer at the studio got her to actually pose for shots. Who is this girl? Why isn’t she shouting “I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS, DADDY!” and wandering off?
Well, at least I have this picture of Mandy, which makes me laugh because when I look at it I can’t help imagining her saying “The Queen is not amused!” in a snooty, falsetto voice.
And speaking of unamusing, this whole parenting thing has gotten more advanced lately. During the impromptu backyard gathering I wrote about last week, some of the kids brought up the cheerful subject of death. Because, you know, it’s a popular topic among kids. The three year old girl from next door piped up that her dog and her grandpa were both dead, apparently listing them in order of importance. The kids seemed to want to impress me with their knowledge of this fact of life, but I just put my hands in my pockets, hummed, and stared at the sky. It worked, because they eventually stopped saying things to me.
Apparently Sam brought up the topic again with Geralyn, who was caught a bit off guard. Bowing to her lack of intimate, first-hand experience with the event, Ger decided to keep the explanation truthful but simple, saying that when someone died it meant that they went away and you never ever got to see them again. This seemed to satiate Sam’s curiosity for all things morbid and macabre, and she let it go.
For a while. The other day I was reading Sam one of the Easter books we had dug out of storage. When I got to the part that talked about how Jesus died, Sam straightened up and squawked, “That means he went away and nobody ever saw him again!” She then smiled like this was the greatest thing ever.
“Well,” I said, “That’s normally true. But Christians believe that Jesus was the only one to ever come back.”
She blinked at me, giving me a slightly annoyed look. “When you die that means that nobody ever sees you again, Daddy.”
“Right, but Jesus was–“
“NOBODY SAW HIM AGAIN! Turn the page.”
And so it was. My daughter the skeptic, rewriting thousands of years of religious teachings with a spastic flick of her hand. And just in time for Easter.
The professional photos are great but I think your photos capture more of the girls’ personality than the professionals shots do!
I’m impressed by the studio shots. My wife likes to take our kids to Kiddie Kandids (don’t know if that’s local or not) and the shots always look to staged that the children look like they don’t belong there. Babies limbs stuck in positions that they’d never go, smiles that look like they’re made of plastic. Your are actually decent, I think you got lucky.
Yeah, don’t short change yourself, your pictures are far and away better than the ones from the photo studio.
Well, thanks for saying so all. I was just kind of amazed that they got Sam to actually pose for the camera and behave for longer than a few seconds.
Well Jamie, perhaps “The Queen [was] not amused!” but I was! Great post, as always.
As for death, the book for young children that I wholeheartedly recommend on the topic is “Lifetimes” by Bryan Mellonie and Robert Ingpen (it is aptly subtitled “a beautiful way to explain death to children”). If you haven’t seen it, you really should take a look.