Ooh, Baby Baby!

When I pasted these together in Photoshop, I couldn’t stop thinking of this song. Dorky, I know.

Anyway, my wife held a baby shower for my sister at our house and I grabbed these really quickly before the shindig started.

I hope her husband takes pictures of their child as he or she (They won’t find out who’s coming, which drives me nuts!) grows ’cause nothing’s funnier than seeing who you and your parents used to be.

A Prison Sentence.

So my 10 month old son has taken to waking up in the middle of the night, standing at the edge of his crib, and screaming his bloody head off. It’s far less fun than it sounds, if you can believe that.

What he wants most is for someone (namely me, ’cause my 2-year-old daughter is my wife’s responsibility in the small hours) to come pick him up and hold him. Maybe he’d even like to get into my bed so he can sleep somewhere that’s not his bed.

I am not down with this.

I’ve taken to going into his room and sitting with him. It occurred to me the first night I watched him try to stay awake (between the hours of 4:45 and 6:15) that it’d be super fun to photograph him, so I set up some lights the next night and caught this around 5:45. To my mind, he’s plotting his escape. He’s gonna get out of this dump, he figures. He’ll find a family that’ll treat him the way he wants.

I’m sure I should be doing more to help him, but at least this way, we’ll have proof of his idiosyncratic nocturnal ways when he’s bigger.

And maybe by then, it’ll be funnier than it is tragic.

Small vs. Big.

I really like (although I am not very good at) playing soccer. I coached in one place or another for about 10 years of my teaching career, growing to appreciate the sport and still not getting a lot better at it.

One of my favorite times as a player (did I mention that I wasn’t very good?) was when I played at an indoor sporting facility called RISE. Playing indoor means wearing slightly different shoes than playing outside. It also means that one can immediately enjoy a beer after a match with one’s teammates ’cause there’s a bar on the premises, but it’s the shoes that are important.

I wear these most of the time ’cause they’re comfortable and if they’re not too terribly beat up, they match a lot of my clothing, looking simultaneously neat and casual. They’re Adidas Sambas and when I found a pair that fit my daughter when she was still a baby, I snapped them up. Now that my son is that size, he wears them. ‘Cause after all, it’s not like either of them did (or is gonna do) a lot of walking in them,

I’d been thinking about doing a shot like this for a while and finally got around to it. I’m not sure I’m finished with it ’cause the placement of the shoes might need some work. Nonetheless, it makes me smile to see them.

Big Boy Pants.

We’ll probably use those very words again when he’s toilet training, but for the moment, he’ll have to settle for the humor.

This was an idea for a shoot that my wife came up with before he was born. I’ll need to reshoot it later on so it’ll look cleaner, but the idea here is pretty fun.

The Light Brown Menace.

Tell me that’s not the face of the Hulk before he crushes something.

The Smallest Cosmonaut.

Again with the props, yeah? It was hard to pass this up when I found it on eBay. I almost bought two of them ’cause they were so cool. Since there’s this picture of my daughter, Zoe, I thought that my son Henry would enjoy equal time. He was actually pretty mad for most of this impromptu shoot and this was a moment of quiet.

The Inconvenience of Being Born.

This is a title shamelessly lifted from this amazing Amy Arbus book. Once you’ve had a look through and can compare it to people you’ve observed at the moments they come into the cold world of air and light, can you truly appreciate.

This is my son, Thomas Henry Scott, IV. Trust me when I tell you that he’s named for his grandfather. Certainly there will be other images of him to grace the web, but these are the beginning. Happy Birthday, Henry.

EDIT: Almost forgot the numbers – 8 pounds, 6 ounces and 20.5 inches at 10:51 am, January 30th, 2009.

And this is the french fry heat lamp they put him under right after he got here. It should be noted that his sister was considerably angrier when this all happened to her and despite that, we’ve kept her.

Plumbing.

Here’s me digging in the depths of my images to find something to post while I await a new scanner and several rolls of film. That being said, the photo pipeline is, how do you say, backed up?

On the downside, the black and white film I meant to process kinda got lost in the shuffle. I ended up heading to the gym instead.

So this is my daughter being nonplussed. She’s bigger now and wrestling her into those headphones again would be nigh impossible, but this is an old fave of mine.