April 29, 2006

Working for the weekend


P1010426
Originally uploaded by billyjoebob.
Saturday Morning, punkin. You're up in your highchair gorging on your first ever meal of pancakes and milk, and your mum and I are seriously considering changing out of our pyjamas.

You would have been having banana pancakes, but bananas are currently around $20 a kilo, the same price as, say, top quality porterhouse, so they're not a huge item on your menu at the moment.

I'm playing with some new photographic techniques at the moment, one of which you can see here. This photo came about through using my hand to "bounce" the flash up to the ceiling, which results in the fractured light you can see here. One of the things I have trouble with when I'm taking photos of you is that you move very quickly, and that in low ambient light conditions I wind up with hundreds of blurry shots. Short of buying myself a ludicrously expensive speedlight, flash bounce is a relatively easy and very inexpensive way of making sure that I have enough light in the scene but at the same time avoid washing out colours, shadows and textures.

This weekend for your mum and I is going to be pretty hard work. We're tidying the house up getting ready for your big party, trying to figure out what we're going to do with all the furniture, where we're going to stash all of the detritus that we've managed to accumulate, how we're going to make our house look like we're proper parents. When I was talking to one of the people who are invited to your party (who shall remain nameless), she said that she was always scared to go to any functions with what she called "the real parents".

There's always a feeling of apprehension when you're going to see other people with kids, you're always worried that they're going to somehow see through what you're doing and realise that, as a parent, you're making it up as you go along, that somehow some others have a plan or a strategy that is better than yours. This is of course, a complete and total and utter fallacy. Nobody knows what they're doing, because no baby or child is ever, ever, ever the same. Or ever consistent.

And that's what we love about you. You keep us guessing, punkin.


Love you.

4 comments:

Kathy said...

That is totally how my partner and I feel, like we're the only ones winging it with our kids and everyone else has access to Some Grand Master Set of Instructions that we haven't seen ... except we know really that everyone's in the same position, adrift on the same vast and unpredictable ocean. I think the Breton fishermen's prayer is quite apt for parents of young children: "Lord, watch over me. The sea is so wide, and my boat is so small".

Oh, and we are also in clean-up mode for our youngest's first birthday, three weeks ago today but believe me, it'll take that long to get there...

Kathy said...

I meant three weeks FROM today. Gah.

Sasha@Pw said...

I love your blog. I have a blog called pregnancy weekly where we celebrate pregnancy and mothers. I added a link to your site, so you can be part of our community. If you would like me to be taken off please let me know. Thank you! :)

Ren said...

That child is getting cuter! Look out world.