Pictures!

I finally took the girls to get pictures yesterday. I usually try to have pictures done of my babies before they are a year old. Well, Faith is now over 13 months old, so I figured I really had better get moving on this! I went to Portrait Innovations, and we had a VERY good experience there. I was very pleased. We used to go to Kiddie Kandids, but when I looked them up online to make an appointment, I discovered they had filed bankruptcy and gone out of business! Well, their loss was our gain, because Portrait Innovations was even better. I think Kiddie Kandids problem was that they had not gone digital. Portrait Innovations is all digital, so the photographer snapped a ton of pictures--115--with none of the "Well, you have to pick if you want this picture before we can move on, or it's lost forever". Also, the camera is a regular one that the photographer can move around, not like the old ones that hang from the ceiling. Maybe all the places are like this now--I really try to avoid portrait studios as a whole, so it's been over a year since I had pictures taken of the kids, LOL.

When I put Faith down on the backdrop thing, she immediately started crying and crawling away as fast as she could. I had flashbacks to a photo session at Pennys not long after we moved here. Jonathan was about 16 months. The very first picture the girl took was of Jonathan, and he looked like he was smiling, but actually he was gearing up to cry. Even with treats, he never smiled again, and I did not get a picture of all the boys together, which was incredibly frustrating. The girl was terrible, though. She had absolutely nothing in the way of tricks to jolly him out of his bad mood and scared-ness. This photographer was MUCH better, and he as well as another girl worked diligently to get Faith to smile. It worked! We got some really cute pictures of her.

Anna had almost the opposite problem. As soon as she was posed, she fixed this huge tight smile/grimace on her face, with her eyes all squinty, and nothing anyone could do or say made her relax it. Some of the pictures are hysterical! Nathan, Luke, Caleb, and I were totally cracking up when we were going over them after the session was over. I kept saying, "This really isn't how she smiles--although it's definitely how she looked today!" We tried to pick the best of the bunch. Oh well--it's just a phase. I remember my brother Dan going through a squinty smile phase!

So we got some good pictures, some of which I posted on Facebook. We will try to send some out soon, but I am not guaranteeing it being too soon, LOL. It was a very positive experience. I highly recommend Portrait Innovations!