Backblogged Again

I have this tendency, when I have specific events to cover in my writing queue, to avoid writing about anything else until I have those entries finished and polished and posted. Unfortunately, this means I sometimes leave these entries unwritten due to a lack of time or energy or other resources, until I finally declare blog bankruptcy and relegate these half-finished entries to a digital file of Stuff That Will Never Get Blogged.

I’m hoping to avoid that this time, even though I have things to say about Mom’s visit nearly a month ago, and Halloween, and my Physical Therapy regimen (which is about half over now), and my braces adjustment from a week and a half ago, and pictures from Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day last weekend, and a few non-time-sensitive things I have shaking around in my brain, too. There’s also some stuff I want to say about Connor — and that’s always time-sensitive, since he’s always growing and changing.

Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up a bit over the Thanksgiving holiday — if I apply myself, that is. Just because I have a few days off doesn’t mean that writing time will spontaneously become available to me if I don’t plan for it. Especially since I’d also like to spend some time with my family.

Writing is important to me. It’s so easy to forget the day-to-day things, to get wrapped up in stuff, and I love being able to look back on days past and remember the details I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten.

Planning the Annual Schnuth Family Christmas Self-Portrait

Yeah, it’s not even Halloween yet and I’m already thinking about Christmas. Our annual family self-portrait, anyway.

It’s fun for me, yet it’s also a source of stress. Every year I want it to look perfect, and I plan for weeks to figure out the right seating, posing, lighting, framing. Inevitably, even with all that planning, something goes awry. Even so, just the fact that it’s a family self-portrait in our own home makes it that much more perfect: a slice of life.

Last year’s portrait session involved a tantruming toddler and a grumpy Daddy. I had to merge two versions of the portrait in Photoshop to get the end result (which still wasn’t awesome, for various reasons).

Christmas Portrait 2013

The year before (shown above) was one of the best, actually — Connor had these fantastically rosy cheeks, the cat laid down calmly on Aaron’s lap, and everybody was in focus at f/6.3 with off-camera flash. We had our moments of Are We Done Yet? — but we have those every year, just about.

I wished I’d remembered to comb Connor’s hair for our 2012 photo, and I wish he were sitting up straighter, and I wish the cat weren’t trying to escape (as usual), but otherwise it actually turned out pretty decent.

Connor’s first Christmas portrait was one of those awesome slice-of-life moments, where he cried his fool head off while we took the actual photo, plus Aaron and the cat looked like they were photobombing Connor and me, thanks to a narrower depth-of-field than I’d intended.

Before that, it was just a matter of keeping everybody in focus and happy — which I still had issues with, even without a kid in the mix.

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