Model behaviour

After we came home from the cornfield maze on Saturday, Liam had a nap and then dinner (oatmeal and squash - now doesn't that sound like a treat!) And then the three of us proceeded to play for a couple of hours. We seriously had several hours' worth of him rolling around on the floor and being tossed up in the air, laughing the entire time. And all I could think was, Damn you Sears! See, my baby *is* a perfectly happy little guy! This renewed the drive in me to get a good photo of him, but I wasn't about to trust some teenage hack with my little man again. We were going to do it ourselves.

So on Sunday, after a nap and a feeding, Chad changed him back into the clothes I had chosen for the portrait, and in the meantime I set up my camera and backdrop and white card. And then I spent about five minutes firing off several frames. And all it took to get a smile out of him was to have Captain stroll past on his leash. Snap - perfectly happy baby. (Yes, I had to retouch the backdrop a little in Photoshop to get rid of the cat hair on it - thank goodness for technology). Truthfully, taking pictures of Liam these days is a lot more difficult than it was as a newborn, when he would sleep through anything and I could pose him any way I wanted with minimal fuss. While it's nice to have him able to sit up, whether he's looking at the camera or not is not up to me. And even when he is looking at the camera, he is usually doing something funny with his hands or feet or his clothes have gotten hitched up as a result of aforementioned funny movements. This picture could be a little better if he'd left his hand down and didn't bunch the backdrop under his feet (and if I had realized that the sneakers he was wearing, while cute and colourful on the sides, have bright white soles, and that's all that would show) - but I don't think I will have that much control over him again until he's a teenager and I can bribe him to sit still by promising to lend him the car afterwards. And honestly, details like this bother me a heck of a lot more than they bothered anyone working at the portrait studio on Thursday, the people who thought having his shoulder cut off on one side and two inches of blank backdrop on the other plus a shadow crisscrossing his face made for the perfect shot.

So if anyone wants a copy of our 'official six month portrait', let me know. I would make copies and distribute them to the family indiscriminantly, but when I was at my parents' in September I found the last round of photos I had handed out to the Robinson aunts left behind on the sideboard. You guys are so busted!