Moments of the Month | September 2012

I love September.  Summer is great, but all good things must come to an end, and who doesn’t love a fresh start?

Eighth grade, seventh grade, fourth grade and kindergarten.  Yikes, they look so BIG here…

We’ve taken this photo of all the neighborhood kids since the first September we lived here in 2003.  This year, after the picture, the oldest of the group shuffled off to his first day of HIGH SCHOOL.  Again, yikes.

It’s my first day of kindergarten, but I can’t stop making sandcastles …

You may have noticed that although I am constantly taking pictures of my kids, I very rarely ask them to pose or look at the camera or do anything that they weren’t doing already.  This is because I love capturing the candid moments, yes, but also because they, um, don’t very much like it when I do that.  But I learned a good trick in September – how to get your nine year old to pose for you in the beautiful doorway light with no muss or fuss.  One afternoon when getting all my gear and lenses ready for a session, I was having trouble with one of my favorite lenses.  I got all panicky because it wasn’t focusing properly.  I enlisted this handsome guy to stand for me while I figured out the problem (the focus switch had somehow been moved from auto to manual — phew!)  And I got some great shots of him in the process.  I don’t know if I’ll have this success if I try to fake this ploy in the future, but I can guarantee that I will try it and see what happens.

We took advantage of one of the many days off in September to go into the city, wander around a little and meet daddy for dinner.

And my favorite photo from September, which came about because of the ridiculous situation I recognized when Paul’s kindergarten teacher asked for a recent family photo for their classroom.  Could it be that the only recent family photo we had featured all three boys dressed as goats, Matt as a troll and Kate and me as sweet green grass?  Yeah.  Not good for the bulletin board.  That’s how it happened that on a Sunday evening, moments before the sun set after a long day of running around, I all but demanded that the entire crew assemble on the front lawn in front of the tripod, set the self timer, and got this:

I love it.  I also love this great article, which was circulating around the internet a week or so later and which I posted on my Facebook page, but which should be kept in a safe place as a reminder to all of us moms — myself included — that all this freezing of moments and memories of our kids and our family isn’t all about us.  It’s about them, too.  When my kids look at photos and remember their own childhoods, I want to make sure that I’m more than the big head behind the camera.  So, I’m going to try to make myself get on the other side a little more often.