Louisa

Back in Feb. we visited Alex and Louisa for a few days.  It was great to see them.  The cousins really seemed to pick up playing as if it hadn't been 2 months since they had seen each other.  That made me very happy. 

Louisa came over to swim in our hotel pool one morning. 

The quality of these pictures is really quite lousy (but the girls are wonderful!).  I did a stupid thing.  The light in the pool area was beautiful so I wanted to take some pictures.  I went and got my camera which had been in my car overnight.  I brought it in from the dry, 20-something degree air directly into the very humid, 80-something degree pool room.  It fogged up like I have never seen before.  The whole camera and lens was literally sweating streams of water running down the sides.  As I thought to myself, "I really shouldn't turn it on until it dries out", my impatience overcame me and I flicked the switch.  Nice.  Luckily, it didn't short or anything from being turned on while wet and the glass eventually unfogged with no lasting water marks on the inside or anything.  Alot of these are out of focus or still have that haziness from the fog, though.  Alex's friend who is a professional photographer/videographer was very politely mortified by my careless treatment of my equipment.  As she is reading this, my friend Doni is probably gasping as well. 

The girls started playing this jumping game...

This series tells a great story about Gracie. 

1.)  Girls ready to jump.  Grace:  Um, Charlotte, isn't it my turn to be in the middle?

2.) Girls jumping.  Well, two of them anyway.



3.)  Louisa and Charlotte laughing it up.  Grace looks a little put out.

4.)  Hands on her hips, in classic Gracie form.  The kid misses out on stuff all the time because she is hung up on not getting her way about one irrelevant thing after another.  I haven't gotten through to her that it's a tough way to go through life.   

But here's my girl.  I adore her.

 This series is sort of a self portrait.  Gracie was teasing me and jumping up and down on the chair and I saw myself in the mirror as she dropped down out of sight.  I intentionally shot it so I was in focus.  I like it.  I think a good self-portrait is one with me photographing my kids.  I see myself in the pictures that I take of them.   I was reading a few posts down the other day when showing the blog on my phone to a friend.  I noticed that I described the picture of Gracie in the tutu trying to contain a giggle as "this is me trying to make her laugh".  I didn't write it that way intentionally, but it is true that when I look at that picture I see Gracie and her cute smile trying to come thruogh and I also see me behind the camera and hear myself saying goofy things and trying to get her to laugh.  Because she thought she looked good posing for me all serious and model-y and I think she's beautiful when she laughs.   I hope someday my children see the pictures that I took of them as a nice record of them growing up and also as a story of how much their mother loved them and thought everything about them was beautiful.