The latest and greatest

| March 10, 2013

The latest and greatest photos that is! It has been a while since Mark has taken any posed pictures of Sam and we really wanted to have some new ones. She is getting so big and has changed so much in just the last few months since Christmas. Every time I look at her she looks more like a little girl and not like a baby. How quickly she is growing up!

Since it is just about time for us to take our annual Easter pictures it was the perfect opportunity to get everything ready in our home portrait studio. Sam still loves getting her picture taken and when we set up the studio, she can’t wait to pose. Before getting her in her dresses (yup…dresses, plural) Mark  took some preliminary shots of her in whatever outfit she chose.

This is one of Mark’s favorite pictures. It was early morning and Sam was still in her pajamas. She looks so happy, even first thing in the morning. I love morning pictures. Sam looks adorably rumply and just sort of natural, hair untamed and oh so casual.

She has become just like every other kid her age — you ask her to smile and you get a big toothy grin! At least in this one, her eyes weren’t all squinted closed like usually happens with the big grins. We have lots of those pictures…

Later, when I woke up, I got her dressed because we had her cousin Joey’s birthday party to attend. She had a blast and I thought she’d be tired, but nope, she was ready to go for more pictures. She insisted on wearing all of her beads that she had been playing with and also holding her Cat in the Hat. That Cat has become one of her current obsessions. It all started with the cartoon but she loves the book now too.

I got some of these cute smiles while making her giggle. Cat in the Hat was playing drums on her Daddy’s head. Strangely, putting pretty much anything on Daddy’s head while he is taking pictures is guaranteed to evoke bouts of laughter.

I’m not sure exactly what we were doing here, but her expression is priceless. She looks confused, amused, and annoyed all at the same time.

After a while, she wanted me to pose with her. I quickly brushed my hair and obliged. She didn’t want to smile at first because she was too busy talking to me, but a quick tickle did the trick!

Now it’s time for the Daddy’s Girl and her man to pose together. Sam is so in love with her Daddy. I am waiting for her to figure out what being married is because I know she will inevitably decide she wants to marry Daddy.

I am so glad this picture came out as well as it did, for a lot of reasons. One, because Mark takes such beautiful pictures of our girl that he deserves to have at least a few that he is in too. Two, because I love seeing my most favorite people together. Three, because I love how there is FINALLY a picture that helps to answer the question, “Where did all that red hair come from?” Now that Mark has grown out a full beard, you can see a lot of the red in it that was hard to see before. If you look at his beard, the red is all over, but most clearly seen on the bottom right of the photo. He has EXACTLY her hair color in his beard. I have bits of her color as well, but sadly, as I have aged, my hair has too and you can’t see the red highlights as much as you used to, unless I am in direct, bright sunlight. But there. There is your answer, world. Our beautiful, ginger haired daughter got our hair from US. 🙂

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Imagination

| March 10, 2013

One of the very coolest things about having a child this age is witnessing such an amazing imagination. The things that come out of Sam’s mouth now alternate between being hysterically funny to incredibly thought provoking to just silly. I love watching her build things or describe things to me. Lately, she has been fascinated by shadows. Looking for them, making them, describing them, everything about them. The other morning she saw a shadow in our bedroom (that I never did see because it was so insanely early to be awake my eyes wouldn’t open). She was very excited and told me it looked like it had a hat on, like a cowboy. I didn’t even know she knew what a cowboy was, much less what one looked like.

Today, we were outside playing and she was dragging around this mini rake that we use to clean up flower beds and such. She started out by pushing it all around our yard and told me she was mowing the lawn. She then progressed to running wildly down the sidewalk, giggling the whole time, while telling me that she was mowing the pavement. On the way back to our house (for the third or fourth time) she held the rake into the air and told me it was her kite. Every few pavement blocks she would stop and tell me we were at the park where you can fly kites. Each time she stopped she would say, “We are at a new park now” and I’d ask her what was at the new park. Her answers varied from a stream, a bush, to “just some grass”.

It is a shame that as we get older we tend to see the world in such boring terms. We seem to lose the ability to stop and slow down and see interesting things, to make up stories, to be creative. It comes so naturally as a child to suspend reality and just become something else because you feel like it. To see things that are not there, or to dream up stories about the things that are. Having a child and experiencing the world with them, the way they see it, is like heading down memory lane to your own childhood. And it’s a pretty great trip.

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