Monday, January 2, 2012

Love the Life You Live


This was our holiday card this year. As we decided on a photograph, we worried that our friends and/or family would find us twisted human beings for putting our scouring/crying kids on a card to be sent to the masses, but we were surprised at the amazingly positive response we got from nearly everyone. And, amid these responses, our choice of photograph grounded me in some deep thoughts about our life and our little family.

Last spring my close friend Julia Beck Vandenoever, of Julia Vandenoever Photography, spent a grey spring morning with us in Prospect Park. Adam was ridiculously hung over from a good friend's bachelor party the night before, I was cranky because he had been out to 6am the night before our family pictures (!), and the kids were just...Well, a one and a three year old. Needless to say, anyone who dared hold a camera up to take images of us as a family was a brave individual that day, and Julia did it with grace.

When we got the images back, I was thrown. I blogged about it here, but suffice to say we looked amazing--like photos of fake families that get put in frames (but much cooler, of course). I never like photos of myself, but I liked these. Wow. And there was such a great variety of all combinations of the four of us.

But, like every busy family, the photos were taken in April and by December they all still only existed on the computer. When we went back to look for a holiday card shot, I laughed--heartily--at the many photos of either one, or the other, or both of the kids crying. They sulked, scowled, cried, and ran away from Julia during the shoot, but she kept shooting. And it's those photos that I love the most: the ones of my kids being the little pissers that they are every day. She truly captured who they were, at those ages, in images. I'm not sure every photographer would keep shooting, or that every photographer would present those images in the final edited version that the client gets, but I am so thankful Julia did.

As much as we all try to get our kids to smile, be cute, look like little angelic model children, I think we all know that our kids can be difficult, challenging, or downright intolerable. I'm so thankful to have images of some of these less-than-perfect emotions documented. There were many a beautiful photo of them as well, but somehow they didn't resonate in me like the cranky ones.

And maybe I am twisted to put it on a Christmas card, but, as my friend James said in a text to me proclaiming his love of our card, love the life you live.

And I do.