This is the end of NaBloPoMo. Having successfully completed the challenge twice, I don't feel too overdone by it this time. It's a good thing for building the habit of posting. I wonder sometimes why I bother to post, as the site has little focus to it now that both the adoptions are completed. It's mostly just a vanity thing: "A Blog About ME!" I'd like it to be more focused on the issues of trans-racial/international/special-needs/toddler adoption, and while I do consider that to be the underlying theme of why I post, it's hard not to drift off into the daily minutiae of plain old family life and the regular junk of common parenting because that's what our life mostly consists of. And so for today, my last post of NaBloPoMo '07, a post on the regular junk of common parenting and plain old family life:

Family Portraits:
This is something I stress on. Especially now that we're on child number four. Thank goodness for digital cameras, because I don't think we'd have any pictures of Kai and Shen without them. I have tremendous guilt over the wretched imbalance in the documentation of Cam and Ben's early years. Cam was the first born. You should see the Sears photo package we bought of him as a baby. They took us for everything. If they showed it to us we bought it. With Ben: just the basic package thank you.

Now that we're on boy #4 (who is instantly four years old) I stress about getting formal portraits. Add to that the desire to get a family portrait while we still have some slim chance of rounding up the older two, and the pressure is really on! So today we went and did it. We went to Sears. The Premier photo studio for when mediocre is all you can afford. To be fair now, I don't believe Richard Avedon or Annie Leibovitz could have done much better with what we gave them to work with.

The photographer was a nice kid who was very professional in his manner. Cam and Ben were extremely cooperative and very patient with what was at best, a pretty crummy time for a teenager to put up with. Kai and Shen were fidgety and non-cooperative in that annoyingly natural way that children who are just barely four and five years old inevitably are at times like these: "Sit still, look this way, smile, no smile nice, no smile like this, no look this way, no hold still, put your feet here, put your hands down, don't pull your shirt up." Chasing that elusive shot of six people with all their eyes open, facing the same way, looking semi-pleasant. Even with all the studio trappings, it's not far off from wild-life photography.

But we did it! Is it the family portrait I've always dreamed of? Far from it. It would take a multi-day session with both Annie and Richard to produce what I'd really like, but I love this picture We're all in it, our eyes are all open, we're all facing the same way, and I think we're all semi-pleasant looking...