It is the time of year when I once again ponder why people send holiday cards from their family but the card is just a photo of the kids. It's such a shame! I've said a million times already that it doesn't matter how fat you are or how badly your roots need dyeing. You matter and you need to get in the damn picture. Think about what message you are sending your kids if you are absent from every photo. I could write a whole post about this, and already have, so I'm moving on. Even if you don't have someone to take the photo for you, using the self-timer on your camera is so fun! The fun of getting the photo is really part of the experience you will remember. Make memories! In fact, one of the funniest memories of ours happened because we were taking self-timer photos. Now that our mom is gone, it's safe to spill the story.
One Christmas, Mom had planned a big fancy family dinner. She talked about it for weeks. And by planned, I mean she made reservations at a foofy French restaurant. Karen and I lived (together) two hours away from Mom and the foofy French restaurant. We packed all the presents in the car, got dressed up, and got on our way. Somehow during the long drive, I realized there was a timer on my camera. We took some photos in the car and boy did we look fabulous! We pulled in to Palm Springs in great time and one street was all decorated with holiday lights, the sun was setting, and like I said, we looked fabulous. The timer on the camera was calling us! We had to pose for photos! In all the fun, time escaped us and we were now 20 minutes late to Mom's fancy dinner. We knew we could not say we pulled over to take photos because that would make her mad. So of course, we were going to say holiday traffic was terrible. Before we went in to the restaurant, Karen told me that she'd eaten there before and to save time since we were so late, just to order the puff pastry with mushrooms thing for both of us so we wouldn't hold anything up. Ok! As we walked in, I glanced at the menu and saw puff pastries with mushrooms, wine sauce, something, something, something, sweetbreads, something, and cream. That sounded good and just what Karen described.I ordered that for both of us and we sat down as everyone glared at us for being late. My camera -and the evidence of our lateness- was hidden safely in the car.
Dinner came and we started eating. The sauce in the puff pastry was delicious but I didn't see any sweet bread thing. There was some weird white chewy unidentifiable object in with the mushrooms that I didn't really like. Karen was to my left, our sister-in-law to my right. Our sister-in-law is French and always seems to know what unidentifiable foods are. I asked her what the white thing was. She looked at the menu, got a funny look on her face and said, zees ees the brain of a baby cow! I wished my camera was not in my car. I asked Karen if this puff pastry was the same as the one she ate before and she said it was a bit different. Um, wool, if we hadn't been taking photos of ourselves we would've had time to read the menu and ask what sweetbreads are! What fun would that have been? Thanks to us being late taking photos of ourselves, we have a really good memory!
This weekend, my husband and I were taking our family photo with the self-timer and a memory was made (see, again!). When I was setting up the camera, I noticed Apocalypse lurking around our yard. She even appears in the background in some photos. Aw, how cute! My husband went inside to get Suki, we got our poses on, and out of the corner of my eye, I sensed something going on near our screen door. We snapped a bunch of photos and Suki reached her 25 second time limit of being held. I didn't see Apocalypse in our yard anywhere. Hmmm.... We came back inside and there was mangy Apocalypse! She'd made herself right at home and was sitting down to dinner at Suki's bowl. She was not even phased a bit by us walking in. She didn't seem too interested in leaving, either. We were laughing so hard! We got Apocalypse out and we gave her some treats.
Now we have cute photos of our entire family and happy memories.
The fun of self-timer shots has become part of our tradition. Try it! You may feel dorky the first few shots but then you warm up and the magic happens. Once the magic happens, even the dorky shots look good.
Go for it!
*This is not the photo we are using for our card because that would ruin the surpirse! I put some of our portraits here.