My dear, darling Simon,
You, my middlest boy, are eight years old today. Of course, in your own mind you’ve been eight years old for at least as long as your older brother was that age. You may be the only eight year old boy I know who is dipping his toes in the ‘tween years!
My sweet Simon, you continue to be the family ham. You have a flair for drama, for humour, and for performance. You are warm and generous and like to see people happy. You impressed all the grown-ups in the family immensely just this weekend at your birthday party, when you offered completely without prompting to share the two months of Club Penguin memberships you received with your older brother, knowing that he wanted one as badly as you did. You are truly a kindhearted, generous soul.
School seems to come easily to you, as does making friends. Your last report cards contain nothing but praise. You also seem to think and speak way beyond your years. You are argumentative and challenging when it suits you, and relentlessly curious. While I know these traits will do you very well in the long run, I do have to admit that they’re occasionally exasperating to a parent. 
The thing I most admire about you, Simon, is that you accept everyone as your peer and your equal. Whether conversing with an adult, a younger child or a teenager, you simply assume that you are friends and that you will be accepted as an equal. I think a lot of people could learn a lesson or two from this! On the same token, you do occasionally need to be reminded that you are NOT an adult and not privy to every conversation that happens between adults, and have been chastised for cheekily calling teachers by their first names.
You continue to be a fussy eater. You like what you like and you are stubborn when you don’t like something or you think you might not like something. You have finessed the “I can’t eat any more, my stomach hurts” excuse when there is nothing left but vegetables on your plate. You like spicy food and love that Daddy occasionally lets you drink pop with your dinner. Your favourite dinners are tacos, pizza and (sigh) McDonalds. You also like the idea of cooking and baking, and have asked to make your own lunch or breakfast several times, and you asked for and received an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas. You, my boy, are a child who was born to break stereotypes. 
Your friends are Alexander and Mason and Olivia, and of course all of your big brother’s friends, too. You like Club Penguin, Super Mario Brothers, Pokemon, the Wii and the DS. You love to play board games and card games, but you also love your “Puffle” stuffies. You are less enthusiastic about active, outdoor games, but you are a much better sport about getting out and moving than you used to be, especially if there are other kids about. This year you joined Beaver Scouts and seem to love it, perhaps in part because Daddy has signed up as a Beaver leader to help out. I think we’re both relieved that we decided against enrolling you in hockey this year.
Sweet Simon, your endless warmth and affection more than make up for your occasional sharp temper and impatience with your little brother. You’re on your way to a larger-than-life personality, and it’s delightful watching you grow up. It’s also wonderful to simply spend time with you, and we love you very much.
Happy birthday, Simon my love. I wish you every dream your heart can wish — and with your creative imagination, there is no end to the possibilities that may bring.
As I mentioned earlier, I had the chance last week to help out during a portrait session for adorable nine-day-old twin baby boys with Ottawa photographer Christine Denis. I finally had the time to sort through my pictures and pick out a few more favourites.
One of the best parts of working with Christine (aside from the simple pleasure of her company!) was learning how to set up some of the classic newborn poses. I’ve worked with babies a few times now, but never as young as nine days (!) old. If you’re working with newborns, it’s really ideal to take the pictures in the first ten to fourteen days if you want to pose them like this.
(I swear, even after looking at these pictures for days, I can’t help but sigh every time I look at that one. Maybe Beloved will let me have just one — or two! — more babies?)
The boys were so calm and docile. They slept agreeably for most of the session, allowing Christine to shift and settle them with nary a complaint. In fact, they seemed quite happy to be the centre of attention.
I continue to be a fan of wee feet and itsy-bitsy fingers.
I’d posted a version of this shot earlier, but I think I like this one better. The other one was a very tight crop, but I think this one works better to show how tiny the boys are, safely cradled in their parents’ arms.
Don’t you wish you looked this radiant nine days after the birth of your child(ren)?!
I think this one might be my favourite. So peaceful…
It was a genuine pleasure to take photographs of this sweet family, and I learned so much working with Christine. If you’re interested in booking a family or newborn portrait session, I’d love to hear from you. I’m now booking sessions for winter and spring 2012! You can get more information about sessions and prices on my Mothership Photography site.
Oops, has it really been a week since I’ve put up a new blog post? That has to be a new record for me. Sorry about that, I’ve been knocked on my keister by a cold and a migraine and kindergarten registrations and the preparations for birthday season, which begins here this weekend.
I did still manage to keep taking pictures, though! The absolute highlight of my week was spending some time with the kind and talented Ottawa photographer Christine Denis, assisting while she took portraits of these nine-day-old twin boys. *melt*
Isn’t it almost enough to make you want to have more babies? They were so calm and docile and delicious, and I learned so much about newborn posing and portraiture from Christine. Wow, is it ever a lot of work, but oh my goodness, how adorable is this?
I’ve got a few more I hope to share later in the week, but I think those were my two favourites from the session. From warm and fresh to old and cold — I was delighted to find what I think is a pretty unique view of the Peace Tower when I was out on a walk downtown. This is the ruins of the former carbide mill on Victoria Island, build in 1892 by Thomas “Carbide” Wilson. I noticed the windows and shifted my perspective back and forth a bit (“zoomed with my feet” as they say) until I had the Peace Tower lined up in one of the windows.
We visited friends who foster reptiles on the weekend, and they introduced us to Edgar, the Florida King Snake. Tristan, Lucas and I thought he was pretty cool, but Beloved feels about snakes pretty much the same way Indiana Jones does. (“Snakes? Why does it have to be snakes?”)
The rest of the week was all-iPhone, all the time. You know I love my vintage typewriter, and I finally got a Hipstamatic print of it that I like.
This was one of the days I was home sick. It was literally the easiest shot I could compose, short of lying on the couch and shooting a picture of the ceiling. Lucas draws at least half a dozen or so pictures each day, lately almost always of characters from Club Penguin (which he is not, ironically, allowed to play.)
I’ve had these silk daisies as a centrepiece on the table for nearly a year and taken quite a few pictures of them, but never any I liked enough to keep and none that capture what I like about the colours and the glass vase and the bits of sea glass in the bottom of it. The late-afternoon light was hitting it just right, though, and I’m really happy with how this one came out.
And finally, a shot from the snowy, blustery drive home yesterday. I don’t know why I am so fascinated with rural mailboxes, but I am. Maybe I was a country girl in a former life? I called this one “mailbox minimalism”. I don’t ordinarily like the dark frame film on Hipstamatic but I think it works well for this one.
I promise to be a little more diligent about getting you some fresh content for next week!
My friend Heather thinks I owe you a retraction. Remember this post, where I congratulated myself for my level-headedness and maturity in managing to pull myself out of a frenzy of consumeristic covetousness and NOT impulse-buy a new iPhone 4S? She thinks I owe you a retraction because I went out and actually did buy the new iPhone four days later. I think I deserve a medal for waiting for four whole days. And pro haggler that I am, I managed to wrangle a deal on my data plan so that I’m actually paying less per month for wireless than I was for our ancient non-data-plan Krazr, so we’ll save the price of the new iPhone in about a year and a half. Yay!
And oh my sweet lord, what a treat is the new iPhone 4S! I have only barely begun to figure out the voice-activated Siri stuff, but the camera? Wow! Well here, don’t let me tell you — let me show you!
“Hey, look Willie! Mom got a new iPhone!”
I went out for a drive on Sunday to take some pictures and started playing with Hipstamatic, an app I’ve had on my iPhone for more than a year but never warmed to. I’m kinda digging it now! (Do you like the digital sticky tape holding the collage together? I added that in Photoshop.)
This was the view from my office window when the sun hit an icy tree on Sussex Drive, also via Hipstamatic.
And this one is straight-up out of the iPhone, no app required. (I have been coveting a wide-angle lens for my Nikon so I can do this kind of big-nose distortion, but the iPhone’s angle of view is just wide enough to satisfy my creative urge for now!)
And speaking of the Nikon, I didn’t abandon it entirely this week. I’m glad I had it with me on Monday when this spectacular sunrise lit up the sky over the Byward Market. No colour enhancement on this one, I just pointed my camera and clicked.
You might have seen this one in my post yesterday. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but only recently had enough skill to be able to make it come out like I planned in my head. The text is actually added after the fact in Photoshop, which means I can put up just about any message I want. I’m thinking it might make a fun new blog header one of these days.
As I said on Flickr, stand by for the “I am so much more than just a mom with a camera” version. Speaking of which, I’ve made a few allusions recently to Internet drama. I thought you guys would get a kick out of this. I got tangled up in a war of words on a Flickr forum recently with Ottawa photographer Paul Couvrette, who called me a “mamarazzi” and criticized me for (among other things) undercharging for prints and making my pictures available online. While the criticism stung at the time, especially since it was more or less unprovoked and definitely overly vicious and personal, the apology he later posted was laugh-out-loud funny. I had no idea at the time, but apparently he had “personified [Dani] as an icon of the ill direction towards which I believe photography may well be headed.” Nice, eh? I’ve never been called an icon of anything, let alone the downfall of an entire industry. And I thought I was just taking pictures because it made me happy. So if I hike my prices next year, you can blame Paul Couvrette.
Mostly, though? I still just love taking pictures.
And hey, this made me feel a lot better. I got my Getty Images sales statement at the end of the week, and this picture from October apparently ran in the Wall Street Journal during December.
And this picture of Willie was bought by a company that makes greeting cards and calendars with titles like “Napping Cats of 2012.”
Hmmm, can you guess which one I’ll be adding to my “as seen in” portfolio? I mean, the WSJ is great, but the Napping Cats of 2012 calendar? Does it get more prestigious than that?!
Cuz yanno, sometimes a picture does say it so much better than a thousand words could.
I read somewhere in the Ottawa media recently that today, January 19, is the official “dead of winter.” Today is the date with the lowest average daily temperature of the entire year, and the average daily temperature creeps upward from here. So now we can officially say that winter is more than half behind us.
I was trying to pacify myself with that thought as I scraped that merciless ice off my windows at sparrow’s first fart yesterday morning in the rampaging wind. Summer is coming!!
Since winter is on it’s last legs (heh, maybe a little too optimistic?) you might as well get out and enjoy it during Manotick’s official winter carnival, Shiverfest! It runs next weekend, January 27 through 29.
There will be horse-drawn sleigh rides, a chili-cookoff, a photography contest, a trivia night, bands, reptiles, a kids’ play area and more! You can check out this PDF for details on the full weekend of activities.
