Eli Asleep

Derek and I moved Eli all around and gnereally pestered him like crazy to get these few shots. He slept through the whole thing. When we were done, I left him lying there on the pillow and he slept another hour. I guess it was comfortable.




My favorite.

Post #202

I wanted to have some monumental, really great thing to put in the 200th post on this blog, but it got away from me. This is post #202. Oh well. As far as the really great thing goes, for me it doesn't get a whole lot better than this :)





An unexpected bonus - my mom came for dinner wearing a royal blue shirt. So I enrolled her into doing some quick pictures with all the kids. I haven't had a chance to edit them yet, but they're cute!

The first attempt

I asked Derek to set up a mattress in the studio and deluded myself by thinking it would be easy to get a nice picture of all three kids this way. The girls love to play with Eli when he is awake. I thought they would come right over if I set him down on the bed. I was wrong. They know what the camera means and can be real pills about cooperating with me. Oh well.

Eli is too small to shy away from the camera.



I got this one of Charlotte. I think it shows the big kid she is becoming and a little bit of her new 4 year old attitude. She has become much more confident and sure of herself in jsut the past few months, which I think is a good thing for her. She can be a little mouthy sometimes, which is not always such a great thing for me and Derek. I am sure it will get better by the time she's 16.



Gracie loves to kiss the baby and tickle him and play with him. She puts both her hands flat on his face, one on each cheek, and cradles his face. She did that the other day and then turned and informed me, "her likes that." (She defaults to the feminine pronoun most of the time.)



The big allure of the mattress was jumping, which I anticipated. We took a whole series of jumping pictures. These are just a sample.

More of the bub

He's started to grow into some of the little outfits I bought him specifically for pictures. Lord help him.






You can definitely see the dimple on his right cheek in the last one.

Eli Awake

Derek helped me take some more Eli pictures yesterday. We didn't quite get what i was after, but we got some nice images of him awake. I always struggle to capture that cute, beady eye look they have when they are so small.



The pee shot is a photographer favorite. It is almost inevitable when you shoot them naked for any length of time. One photographer I know used to have a whole section of her website devoted to images like this. I think it was called the Peanut (Pee-nut?) Gallery, or something like that. Derek gets credit for this one from Eli.



I don't know which crop I like the best for this one. One the tighter version you can sort of see his dimple. He definitely has one.

A few of Eli

Here are a couple of my favorites of Eli from his first few days home. I have way more ideas than I have energy for getting through them. He is a very good sleeper for pictures, so hopefully that continues. These are the result of a little mini session in the white chair by the sliding glass doors in the family room. More to edit.

We have fuzzy little babies in the Mohr family. Laura always talks about how furry Derek was, too.



We have chubby babies, too. Doesn't he seem a little round for only 6 days old? I am predicting total butterball in his very near future.





This I took of Grace way back at the beginning of the month. She loves the computer and will sit and play for a long stretch. She is great at the mouse and can navigate everywhere.




We take snapshots, too (and should take more of them). Charlotte and Grandma doing this little piggy for Eli on his first day home.



Charlotte takes her role as big sister very seriously. I joked with others during the pregnancy that her job was going to be getting up to feed the baby in the middle of the night. She would nod earnestly. It seemed funny at the time. After three nights home, she got pretty upset with us for not letting her do her job. She finally asked me last night, "why do you keep feeding Eli in the night? I am supposed to do it. It's my job." My bad parenting humor goes awry again. I felt terrible. We had a nice chat about how feeding in the middle of the night was really a mommy job. It is not very fun and little girls need to sleep. We brainstormed together what would be better jobs for a big sister to do for Eli. She suggested bringing him toys and tickling him. I suggested telling him stories (she was telling him Jack in the Beanstalk yesterday when he was awake). She suggested tapping him on the nose (which she has a little sound effect for). All great big sister jobs, which she has no idea how much he will adore her for in just a few months. I know she's mine and I am completely biased, but she's a really nice kid.

We're home

Eli and I made it home this afternoon. Everything birth and hospital related was smooth and uneventful. Eli is very cute. I like him.



This is the only real close up I have of just him that I managed one evening in the hospital. We'll work on taking more this week. He felt the wide angle made his nose look big in this one, but there's only so much you can do in a hospital room, especially 1 day post-surgery.

Some classic snapshots of the older sisters holding the baby. Charlotte was soooo excited. She waited a long time for this.





This is actually my favorite series of all and the first one is my very favorite. Grace was pretty quiet throughout the pregnancy about the whole new baby thing. She really loves the baby and everything related to the baby, now that he is here. She just lights up when she sees him. She was very eager to hold him.






The second day they visited they climbed into the chair together. This one only Grace is in focus, but I like that about it. It is very much a picture of Grace, I think. My middle child. Very happy (at least in this moment) about her place in the family.



Another of all three.

I should have known

that it was too quiet in there. I found Grace this way at 5:30 this evening. The big dilemma then becomes - let her sleep and screw my chance of getting her to bed at a reasonable time or wake her up and deal with all the crankiness. And Grace can reach a level of crankiness to which words really cannot do justice.



In the end I let her sleep for about 25 minutes and then woke her. It worked out okay.

A snap of the girls last night watching TV together on the couch in my office.





One that Derek took awhile ago at the playground.