Jack's 1st Portraits

I have been SO ready to post our very first professional portraits of Baby Jack! I have actually had them for awhile but wanted to wait until the grandparents got the first peek. A guy I work with at Dillards is also a photographer. He doesn't have a studio so he came to our house the first weekend of January for our hour long portrait session.

Skylar and I woke up that morning to stow away all of the huge plastic baby gear that you can't help but accumulate during these first baby months, so that our house would look good for pictures. I timed Jack's bath and bottle so that he would be clean and full (but not too full as to spit up) once Phom (that's the photographer's name) made it to the house. I had saved a special outfit for this day...one that I received from my baby shower in Ruston and all had loved. It was a precious navy gingham Polo shortall which was sure to bring out the blue in his eyes...even if we were planning black and whites.

It's important to note that around this time, Jack had been on a nap strike and simply refused to take any. In fact the strike had been going on for more than a week, when portrait day came. So why of all days, did the strike have to end that day? Yes, not more than 10 minutes before Phom was supposed to arrive than my precious little one began rubbing his eyes and yawning.

Now while Jack hates to miss out on anything, once the eye-rubbing has started, you have just a short while to put him down before a protest is made. He will commence to fussing like those bad babies some other people have.

Here we are 10 minutes for my perfect photo session, and Jack wants a nap. Are you kidding me? So, I do my very best to distract him. I mean, we only need a few minutes to get incredible pictures of the family, right? He's cute enough that they will all turn out good? And then...BONUS...we can all take a family nap.

Well, I had delayed dressing him in his awesome outfit until the last minute so that no drool (Did I mention we were going through a drooling phase too?) would tarnish his cuteness. So what better time to put him in it then when he has decided to fall asleep? (Sarcasm here.)

So I begin dressing him when I realize...well...the outfit is "not big" on him. I had to pull and push to get him in it. (Skylar tells me it looked too small, but you tell me.) Sleepy babies also do not want to get moved all around to get dressed. Are you following me? Jack was not in the most awesome mood.

As I'm trying to maneuver my child into the clothing, Phom rings the doorbell. You should have seen his face when I answered the door. I had Jack sideways in my arms, half-in, half-out of his shortall and sweat was rolling down my face as I attempted to entertain the increasingly sleepy baby while pulling the outfit on him.

So jump to our first shots. They would be family portraits...the kind that all of my friends have where everyone matches and looks beautiful like they should be in magazines. We'd play it safe with black and white since everyone looks better in those. We made it through about 3 pictures before Jack became mad that he was not napping. Skylar and I worked so hard to pull a smile out of that boy. We got about 4 which vanished before Phom could capture the moment. Not only that, but he was not content to sit or lay in our arms. So we tried our go-to trick. Jack is a big stander. He loves it and is quite proud to show anyone. We simply hold him up while letting him put all his weight on his feet and he just beams. BUT, not today.

After many attempts, Phom suggests a change of scenery and loved the red couch in Jack's room. I'm not sure why we thought that would be different. The only change is that our dog Holly followed us in there and Jack chose this day to become fascinated with her. So all the while we are trying to get him to look at the camera (forget about smiling), he has his head down watching Holly walk back and forth.

It was a disaster. Phom said something about trying again some other day. That put fears in my mind of not getting any portraits made until Jack graduated high school. At some point during our discussion, Jack gave up and fell asleep in my arms. And that's when the best portraits of the day occurred. Imagine that.

Poor patient Phom had to spend over twice the agreed upon time to capture some decent snapshots of our family. He also had touched them up to look absolutely fabulous!!! Thank you, Phom!

Oh, and the few family portraits we took while Jack was awake. They were bad because of Skylar and me. Jack still looked great. Go figure. Hope you like these. :)

Jack's 1st portraits