writer, interrupted: say cheesy!

I am notoriously awful about having family photos made. I find posing for staged pictures to be one of the most awkward, unnatural things in the world, and I think most family portraits are kind of cheesy and, if you'll pardon my twentysomething vernacular here, ghey. That explains why I have ZERO professional photos of myself or Annie from the first eight years of her life. You can imagine how popular this has made me with her various grandparents! I pretty much suck as a mom. But then I moved out here and became besties with a ridiculously stellar and creative chick - I'll call her Lauren, because that's her real name - who has a photography business with her equally talented hubby. I now find myself at a photoshoot every few months or so. The mere fact that I keep signing up to have my awkward picture face caught on camera is evidence of how fantastic my dear friends are behind the lens, but I digress.

Anyway, B. and I did maternity photos, which were really sweet and I'll be happy to share when I figure out what I did with the disc they're on. Then we did one-week photos of Estie, which was the single worst experience of my entire life (and I've given birth twice!). Our brand-new infant who normally slept twenty hours a day suddenly came to life for her big debut, and she was PISSED. She peed, puked and shat all over every prop and surface in the building. Our friends are awesome, so they didn't care - but as a mommy, it was a stressful experience. We tried the whole thing over again a few weeks later with pretty much the same result. Lauren somehow managed to get some wonderful photos from both shoots because she's amahhhzing (again, if I can only find that disc...) but the hubs and I both agreed we wouldn't be trying that again any time soon. I guess five months was long enough to get over the trauma though, because we got talked into yet another session yesterday, this time with the whole fam-damily. Estie did much better this time around, but it was definitely still a challenge getting her to cooperate. But hey, she's a baby, she's teething, and she pees her pants every few minutes - how good of a sport can we really expect her to be? All things considered, it was a really fun shoot. Than again, pretty much any time I get to hang out with Lauren is a good time - fussy baby or not.

Here are some behind-the-scenes shots we stole on my iPhone.

I'll share the final pics when we get 'em!