Some Fall Shots

With the weather looking nice, and fall leaves sitting happily on their branches, I decided to take some fall pictures of my kids the other day. As with most of my daring enterprises, there was little planning -- no matching clothes or clever . . . I don't know . . . chairs? I've noticed people love to put cool chairs in the middle of nowhere for photo shoots. I ought to get me one of those. I did brush my girls' hair out and redo Penny's napped on pony tail. Then I commanded everyone to go find, at least, a white shirt (never mind that most white shirts they own are old stained undershirts) so they would somewhat appear to match.

I realized, quickly, that my dreams of happy smiling children all huddled close and lovingly were merely that -- dreams. I really couldn't get five kids to look at me all at the same time:And then . . . there were the special objects they'd each brought. Somehow I was so focused on their darling little faces (and trying to make those faces look at me) that I didn't notice how distracting a pair of black gloves and a tiger stuffed animal; or, a silk rose and some sock monkeys; or even a Dora the Explorer bag would look in the finished picture. Huh. Well.
And, what about this picture? Jesse? Where did you run off to? And Abe! When Daisy tries to put her arm around you, don't knock it out of the way! Everyone! Stay put.

Thank you Daisy and Abe for your valiant effort here -- only Abe, you're looking blurry (yes, I know that's my fault).
But, the real problem was even more specific. You may have already picked it out as you looked at the above photos. It had something to do with the little fellow you see in the background here:
Yes. That's him alright. Jesse.He was . . . to put it mildly . . . very . . . sad.I think it started when I attempted to make him sit on a rock for a picture with his siblings. Who wants to sit on a rock? Then, whenever he tried to happily wander away and get lost in the mountains, I would bring him back . . . and that didn't sit well. Add to that the fact that I'd foolishly allowed him to bring sock monkey 1 AND sock monkey 2 and -- hoo-ee. He was forever dropping one or the other, picking them up, and sobbing that they were then covered in dirt, small sticks and leaves. But, if I took them away or tried to hide them, he would be certain they were being left abandoned in the woods and would howl all the more.

Abe tried to comfort him a time or two:

And Daisy offered him a leaf:

One time, an airplane flew over head. That distracted him for a minute:

But that sad little fella almost sent us, and our dirty white shirts, home before any real photo-ing had begun. Luckily, we still managed some pretty good shots (as you shall see in the next post).