Family Pictures

Family pictures + me = frenemies. I love seeing other people's pictures and I love the idea of us getting them done. But in practice, they stress me out more than graduate school. For me, 90% of the tension is picking out everyone's outfits. I am terrible at picking a palate, coordinating colors, and then shopping for appropriate clothes that are within our budget. I am fully aware of my ineptitude and then to think about having it immortalized in photographs for which I'm paying a decent amount of money is paralyzing to me.

Thank goodness for Pinterest that has pins like this to help the color-challenged such as myself. And I can sit in the comfort of my own home and order pieces online and not be overwhelmed with multitude of choices in a store. The downside of course is not being able to see everything together before you buy, which in our case necessitated a trip to the mall to return some things and find a shirt for Ben and then a trip to Target to find white shoes for Caroline the day of the shoot (yay for $8 clearance shoes!). 

The other 10% of the stress comes the day of the shoot. Roxanne at Hawa Images is a friend from our old church and it was great to reconnect with her. She immediately made the kids feel at ease and was a pleasure to work with. However, I knew that it was not going to be easy for Elias to "cooperate" and it was going to be quite a bit of work to get a good picture of him individually and maybe impossible to get a shot of us all looking at the camera at the same time and smiling. I tried to let go of my agenda and be realistic about it, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping to get at least one good shot of us as a family all looking at the camera. But honestly, this is our family. We are not ever color-coordinated, my two oldest fight like North and South Korea on the DMZ (which is to say, constantly prodding and provoking each other), and Elias is who he is in all of his wonderfulness, which doesn't include sitting nicely and looking at a camera with a picture-perfect smile (though he will say "Cheese" when a camera is pointed at him, just not necessarily looking at the camera). We are messy and imperfect, but we love each other and we are a family. And that's what I want the images to reflect, which I think Roxanne did beautifully.

Here are some of my favorites:

I wanted pictures of the three kids individually. 

And I wanted pictures of the three of them together:

Ben asks upon seeing this picture, "Why did she take a picture of our butts?"

And I wanted pictures of all of us together, even if we weren't all looking at the camera.

This is way more what we're really like:

I love this one:

And I wanted a decent one of me and Chris, since we haven't had a good picture together since our wedding day:

And I wanted a few candids of the kids:

I love this one of Caroline. Pure joy.

My boys.