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Health & Fitness

Snapshots of Time

Senior picture time!

This has been a summer of radical changes for my family. My daughter has joined the family ranks as an independent driver and we are now discovering how to deal with four people with at least three places to be and two cars to do it. She picks up friends and takes them places. She drives herself to soccer practice. She runs errands... willingly!

Yikes! My kids are growing up. They will be a sophomore and senior in high school this year. Independent. Making choices and decisions for themselves. Dealing with their own consequences. Sometimes, even as much as you don’t want it to, time marches on and leaves a parent in its wake.

This has never been more evident to me than watching my son have his senior pictures taken on Tuesday. I know that I am not the only mom that has dealt with a tightening of the throat and the squeezing of the heart for that reason lately. My Facebook page is full of people talking about it.  Given the stress level my son has about standing in front of a camera (“Ten seconds, mom... you have TEN seconds!”) I had to choose his photographers very carefully. And this time it was a 'no brainer' choice. They were teachers - Kathy Lukes and Lauri Rowley - who knew him in middle school. I figured he’d be more comfortable in their viewfinders... that they would know how to get what they wanted from him in terms of an actual, normal looking, great smile. I was right.

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Because of his stress level, I really hadn't planned to go. I expected to let him do it on his own. At first he said he wanted it to be that way. But, in the end, I went. I figured it would be the last time I'd be able to coax him in front of a photographer until his... wedding?

So that is why I found myself on the high school soccer fields at 6:40 am with my son and Double Exposure Photography. They wanted to take advantage of the 'great early morning light.' They snapped pictures of him in his goalie jersey in front of the high school scoreboard and I was thinking of the boxes and boxes of soccer pictures I have stashed in the closet. Of the pictures I took during his very first soccer game as a five year old and the huge toothless grin of him at six holding his first soccer trophy.

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He changed his clothes and they snapped pictures of him sitting on a bench much like the one I sat on while waiting for the school doors to open in Kindergarten and first grade... and third grade... and middle school. He posed by a wooden rail and wooden fence... and I had a flashback to a similar one in Kentucky where I snapped him with his sister on our first vacation as a family of four. 

He changed again and they posed him in the bushes by a pond... while I was picturing him in his bathing suit, wading and capturing crayfish in a campground pond when he was eight. And as he leaned against a huge tree... I saw the pictures I took of him at four in the very first tree he climbed all by himself. And then at a playground much like the one I used to watch him run around and play chase with school friends on, I laughed as they angled their cameras to get an open eyed shot. I was taken back to the very first time we had a professional portrait taken when he was four months old and newly arrived from Korea. The Olan Mills photographer had stopped in the middle of the session to say “I can’t get him to keep his eyes open so is that okay?” A common problem with an Asian child with a great smile, I am sure.

Snapshots of... time. Captured in 90 minutes.

Gads. Do these photographers KNOW what they do to moms like me with their photography sessions? Excuse me while I go curl myself into a ball for a little while. My son is a senior in high school and there is no way I can stop it.

Sigh.

But I at least I will have the pictures to savor. In my head... and my heart... and now my hands.

Thanks to Double Exposure Photography.

You gals, rock!

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