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Cape May: Part Two - The Wedding!

Now you may have wondered what possessed us to pack up a four, and a six year old and drive twelve-ish hours away, into an entire other country just to splash in some salty water. Well, I'll tell you what. We had a much better reason to visit the beach than just to pick up some shells. The real reason we decided to go to visit Cape May was that we were going to a wedding! 

And not just any old wedding. My Little Brother's wedding. P.J. (or Uncle P.J. as he is known around here) is my little brother only in age, as by the time he hit grade 10, and I was in Grade 12, he was already almost a head taller than I was. Our Little Guy once referred to him as "dat tall uncle wif da no hair." And now that tall guy has finally met his match. Not in height of course (as you will see from the pictures) but in humour, temperament and interests they certainly see eye to eye. 

Lisa (or Aunt Lisa, as she will heretofore be known) is an American, and grew up in Philadelphia, but went every summer to Cape May for a vacation at the beach. Since many fond childhood memories are there, and she knew how beautiful it was, she wanted to have a wedding on that sweet little beach from those happy childhood days. So off we went, with the promise of a seaside vacation into the bargain.

And thus it came to pass, that on the morning of the 13th of June we went to the beach and it looked like this: It was bright, but windy. The surf was choppy and we wore bathing suits and water wings and lots of sunscreen. 

BUT, on the afternoon of the 13th of June we went to the beach and it looked like this: Sunny and bright, with a clean blue sky, and we wore our summer Sunday best, (and still more sunscreen) And where there had just been sand and beach umbrellas before, there were now rows of white chairs, and a little arch with flowers on it, and a man in a top hat waiting for a lady in a long white dress to come and meet him. And all those nearest and dearest to them were waiting to hear them tell each other of their love, and how they would live the rest of their lives together. 

It was lovely. Our little family had our small parts to play in their big day as well.  As the youngest child in the extended family, our Little Guy had the honour of being the Ring Bearer! He took his job very seriously, but luckily did not get nervous about it. He held the little ring cushion very carefully as he sat in his seat, and when the Officiant said, "May we have the rings", his cousin sitting next to him gave him a nudge and he popped up and went straight up there to deliver them. And I had a job too. Besides being the self-appointed provider of sunscreen to small children and the unprepared, I was the photographer. I really enjoy taking pictures, and despite the fact that my brother does NOT enjoy having pictures taken, (never did, even as a child) even he could seen the need to record this beautiful day. I was very honoured to be given this responsibility, and took it so seriously that I wore flats. (For those of you who know me, you realize that this practical footwear decision on a semi-formal dress occasion is a great acknowledgment of the of the importance of my job. ahem.) 

And so they tied the knot and sealed it with a kiss. 

And then smiled and stood and posed for pictures with all the family. (This one is just our immediate family on the Groom's side)

The Ring Bearer ran off with the Bride's parasol.

And the Bride and Groom smiled and posed and posed and smiled for as long as I could get two people who don't care much for posing to do so. Though I must admit that they were more than usually smiley. They must have been having a pretty nice day...

And I'm going to pat myself on the back and say I did a pretty good job with the photos. This one is my favourite. 

And then it was time to head off to Menz's for the wedding dinner, and of course, CAKE! And oh the excitement when the little boys discovered that the cake had LEGO PEOPLE on it! Our joy was complete when they found that each place card was set with a little lego man too. As the little cake banner says, it was the BEST DAY EVER!

This was the first wedding that our boys have attended, and I must say, Aunt Lisa and Uncle P.J. set the bar pretty high as they not only had lego men at their place settings, but were personally gifted with action figures as wedding favours from the bride and groom.  Oh Joy!

Batman flew all over that dance floor!

The night went on, with cake and food and lego people playing, and the bride and groom and all their guests talking and laughing and revelling late into the night, until I finally packed in my camera, picked up the boys and took our tired, happy bones home to bed with the promise of another day at the beach tomorrow. 

Best wedding ever. 

everyday beauty

So I've been doing this thing where I take pictures. I won't say that I am a photographer, because I'm just another person with a digital SLR and there's no need to get uppity about it. But my point is that I'm not always, shall we say, a huge fan of my life. On the bad days (and there have been some bad days lately) it can be hard to see the value in what I do. And yeah, yeah, I know "Moms are important", and I'm sure if I google that phrase I'll get a bajillion heart-felt, uplifting stories about the unsung heroes of early childhood. But my point is that it feels like a bit of a boring slog sometimes. So I'm trying to do what I do and look for the beauty. Trying to make some art. Trying to see beyond the whining and the poop and the endless making of food and engage my eye and brain and heart. So I'm taking pictures of things in my life that are beautiful. They are mostly still-life-y things, and occasionally will involve my kids. But my rule for myself is no styling and no staging. No careful choosing of backgrounds. No wiping of dirty faces. No asking anyone to do anything again while I get a shot. Just pictures of things in my messy life as they are. Like this beautifully smeared plastic-plate paint palette, courtesy of my four year old. 

 Though I will allow myself slight repositioning, as in the image below.Those little boots were set on the balcony railing to dry after a good soaker, late last summer. I angled the little one on the right just a bit, to get a more pleasing angle. And I might move something into a bit of better light. 

But sometimes the light is just perfect, right where it is.

I'm going to try to put up a post like this once a week. Though I'm not committing to a particular day. You'll just have to wait and see. 

Baby's first photo shoot.

Today's post brought to you by our two-year-old. My little point-and-shoot was sitting on the edge of the table the other day, and the Baby got his hot little hands on it of course. And instead of taking it away from him, Hubs turned it on and showed him what button to press. These are the photos he took. 

I wasn't there, but Hubs tells me that the Baby was really, deliberately trying to take pictures. He wasn't just randomly running around pressing buttons, but actually trying to frame shots. 

But he'd get the picture he wanted on the display screen, but then in his careful concentration as the tried to push the button he would lower the camera, often to the point of cutting off the heads of his subject. 

So y'know, lotsa pictures of the floor.

This portrait of his brother is probably my favourite. He really captured the essence of his subject, don't you think? Funny face, hands full of lego and all. 

More floor.

Portrait of his dolly.

And a little fish-eye close up of Daddy to wind up the shoot. 

Makes me think that we should look for opportunities to let him use the camera in the future. I wonder what he'd try to take pictures of outside?

photo ops

Lately the Little Dude hasn't been so interested in having his picture taken. If he's doing something cute and I run to grab the camera he often stops what he is doing by the time I get back. "Could you do that again so I can take a picture, Bub?" I'll ask politely, like the friendly mammaratzi I am. "Nah," he says and that is that. And since I don't want to be that mom, the one who tortures her children with requests for them to hold it for one more minute, do it one more time, this time look at mommy while you are doing it, etc. as that just kills the fun of the moment and creates a child that is averse to having his picture taken. So I don't push it. I just try to be quicker on the draw with my camera. 

But when he asks me to take a picture, I am all for it. Though this is usually the type of picture that I am requested to take: See? Its a Taunaun. Obviously. 

I also take a lot of pictures like this:Lego in focus, little boy in the periphery. I'm trying to remember what this was. A time machine maybe? Or a prison? He's rather fond of building jails. 

Anyhow, just this weekend, he asked me to take a picture of his face for a change. Though of course, it did still involve Lego.

Oh wait, he did ask me to take one where his eyes were showing. Yep, his lovely eyes. And a bagel moustache.

morning light

On my way to get the Baby out of bed this morning, I walked past the Little Dude's open bedroom door. I noticed the light, and thought "I should closet that door so that the Baby doesn't have to be all squinty as we walk past it." And then I stopped and really looked.

And there was something about the room this morning that just looked... beautiful. I mean, its his same old room, but you know that saying "the cool grey dawn of morning"? It was certainly well past dawn, but still, this seemed to be just that kind of light. I'm not exactly a trained photographer, and I don't really usually have time to mess about with a light meter or anything. So this is a bit grainy, but still there is beauty there, to my eye. 

There's something I like as well, about casual disarray. The tumble down slide of the covers, the beloved bunny, dropped at the moment of waking as my little boy abandons him in favour of a quest for lego. The blend of pattern and colour in the sheets and quilts and covers. A certain time of day at a certain time of year. All these things together in the cool grey light are a sort of physical poetry. And somehow, they make me feel warm.

remember

Its the little things really. The little moments that make up a day of parenting. We tend to take pictures of the milestones - the birthdays and first steps and Hallowe'en costumes and all of that. But those little moments, they are the mortar that holds the bricks of my life as a mom together. And I so desperately don't want to forget them. In all the bustle and busy-ness, in all the chores and to-do lists and diaper changes and spills to wipe up, I'm afraid that the sweet everyday moments will get buried in the piles of dirty laundry and and be forgotten. And I know that photographs are not the moment themselves, just a cold copy of the light and bright bit I'm trying to catch. But still, for me they are a little attempt at recording that moment. Holding on to the feeling of a brief time in my life and his before he grows up and out of the moment that we share now. So today I pulled out the camera in hopes that I could record the sweetness of my Baby after he wakes up from nap and nurses in the afternoon. 

His face is different when he wakes up. His pout is extra pouty, his cheeks a little chubbier than normal. We call him Sobersides when he's still too groggy to smile.

Even on an overcast afternoon all the lights are too bright. 

He hunkers down to have his post-nap feed, so warm and sweet. 

His hand flutter across my stomach, searching out the comforting dimple of my belly button. 

Its such a funny little gesture, but so a part of our time together right now. I can't say I always enjoy it, sometimes its a little annoying, but still, its so very him. And I want to remember it, because it is a little tiny bit of our now. 

Eventually he sits up, and his face warms into a hint of a smile, the muscles less slack, the energy starting to creep up to the surface. 

He decides the sun in not so bright and has a look around....

...and busts me out one of those smiles that I love so much. And then he's full of words, questions about "brudder" and his whereabouts, a comment about the bunnies and deer and trains and tractors that are on his mind lately. A request for another kind of snack ('gookie' and 'gandy' are high on the wish list these days) and that's it, the quiet moment is over and we're off to the rest of the hustle and bustle and business of our day. There will be more moments like this tomorrow, and the next day and the day after that, I'm sure. But gradually they will shift and change and one day be gone, and oh, how I want to remember them all. 

There's no way I can sum up the feeling of the two of us curled up together on the couch in the later afternoon light, but at least these photos will someday help me to bring these sweet moments back into my mind long after they have changed into another kind of moment. This moment is. It is now. And we share it together.  

 

queen ann's lace

We live in a funny in-between space here in Ontario. If you look out the front of our house, you see a town and don't have far to drive before you reach a city. But if you look out the back windows, there is the countryside. Beautiful countryside. We sit right on the margin, and as I go about my daily business and drive here and there I am always weaving in and out of developed and undeveloped land. Its an interesting place to watch the seasons change. And as I've gotten older, I've been looking around outside more. I think I'll always be an indoor girl at heart, but I certainly do notice the beauty out there (one of the many gifts my mom and dad have passed on to me as they pointed out the beauty around them. See, I was listening mom, even when it seemed I wasn't). And how it changes with each season. And one thing that I've noticed at this time of year is the big fields of Queen Ann's Lace that bloom each summer. Wide swaths of tall stemmed white flowers bowing and bobbing in the wind. Along the side of the road, in every vacant lot and empty field and on the margins of construction sites. And as I drive by on my way to the grocery store or the library I always think "I should stop and take some pictures." But you know how it is. I have two little boys and just never enough time. 

But last week, after a busy day and sligtly stressful afternoon on the parenting end of things, Hubs came home from work and in the 35 minutes I had between his arrival and dinner time, I decided to disappear with my camera and 'make some pictures' as they used to say when photography was a new medium. I took along a little model to keep things interesting. 

You already know he loves to smell flowers...

...but I also had a bit of a job keeping him from 'tasting' them too. In the split second after I took the photo above he'd opened wide to pop that entire bud into his mouth. Don't worry, I was only inches away and managed to intervene before anything actually got ingested successfully. (He was quite miffed about that.)

I'm always amazed by what beautiful flowers these are, and how sort of alien and un-flower like they look at the same time. I guess its the textile lover in me, but they do have that regular geometric feel that lace doilies have, in that you can sort of see the repeat pattern in them. How I love a repeat pattern. And the subtle shift in colour of green to white from the stem to the bloom is so lovely.

Even though it was the end of the day, and the sun was not directly overhead, it was still quite a cloudless day, and very warm, so we took a moment to sit in the shade. 

We brought a flower along for company though. I find taking pictures of kids so interesting, and photography in general is such a fascinating thing as I've never ascribed to the whole 'pictures tell the truth' theory that we tend to fall for in our culture. Always bear in mind that pictures are a carefully constructed selective 'truth' and moments are often created, not captured. My point is look at that long lashed cherub in the picture above, so demurely sniffing his flower. And then see how different he appears below.

So full of 'piss and vinegar' (as my dad would say) and hollering at the top of his lungs at a passing motorcycle. He was more interested in using that flower to flag it down and brandished it like a beacon. And while these are both 'accurate' pictures of him, (neither of them posed or photoshopped) they tell two very different stories. Just bear that in mind when you read blogs. I don't want you to think that my entire day was spent lolling about in a field of flowers taking pictures of a baby. Pictures only give you a tiny slice of a much larger story (and the rest of that story involves laundry and poop and crying. I just didn't take pictures of those slices. Because my hands were too dirty to pick up a camera.)

After our brief break in the shade we went back out the the flowers to get a few more shots (and a few more flowers) but dinnertime was fast approaching and there is no such thing as long photo shoot with an 18 month old anyhow. So we hopped back into the car, both of us happy for the chance to have been out in the world and enjoying nature and being creative, even if only for 15 or 20 minutes.  We left an empty field behind us and headed back to a house full of busy-ness. And by 'empty' I mean full of flowers. And by 'busy' I mean there were big brothers and a Daddy and dinner to cajole into little mouths and faces and hands to be wiped and dishes to wash and baths to take and stories to read and hugs to get and give and then finally the silence of the end of the day. And after it all, a mangled flower in a jar on the table to remind us of that big green and white field and the few beautiful moments we shared there. 

 

a day at the lake

It was a first for us this summer. Hubs and I alone for a whole day. All to ourselves. At the lake. Luxury I'm telling you, pure luxury.And by alone, I mean not really alone at all. We were with a lovely handful of our dearest friends. But we were sans enfants for the day, as lovely GranGran and Grandpapa were spending the day with them, allowing us to drive down to Lake Erie to our friend's cottage to celebrate his birthday. 

We try to get together with these particular friends at this cottage at least once a year. Its always a slightly different group, as each year there are a few absences due to travel/schedule/distance/illness. And the lake and the weather always vary (look at the sand bar! So shallow out there this year that it was only up to our ankles!), but I can't remember a year when we did not have a great time. 

Note that this year's recreational sport of choice was Synchronized Swimming with Beer in Hand. 

But if borderline crazy sports are not for you, there is always simple lakeside snacking and chatting. 

As the afternoon went on, more friends arrived. 

There were more visitors to the sand bar.

And more sitters in the chairs.

After I'd eaten enough snacks, read my whole magazine without having to stop and take anyone to the potty, and then laid still in the sun for a whole five minutes, I became restless (I'm a bit type A, so sue me) and I decided to do a little art/photography project. I'd brought along a big box of some selections from my vintage bed sheet collection as I've been toying with the idea of using them as photo backdrops for awhile now. So I anchored them with rocks over the side of the retaining wall above the beach and took some informal portraits of my friends. This is kind of a workshoping/first test of an idea, so bear with me as they are not perfect. It was a very, very windy day at the beach, so the fabric backgrounds are a little more, er, dynamic than I'd imagined, and my lovely subjects are not 'styled' at all. But that being said, I'm pleased with the results. And its such a nice excercise, to take pictures of your friends. 

Val, basking.

Val, smiling.

Shane.

Sara

Shane and Sara (just can't keep those two apart).

Stephen to the right. 

Stephen to the left.

Lovely Lara.

Alan

And the man himself, our gracious cottage host and birthday boy, Vaughn.

And after all that sun and water and sand and photography and laughing and talking, there was a giant meal to be eaten; barbecue, salads and corn on the cob. I love corn so much, I could have had just that and been happy. 

A little last bit of sun to bask in, and then it was time for us to leave. We bid all our friends and good ole' Lake Erie a fond farewell, gathered up our scattered stuff and headed for home. We fell exhausted and sun-kissed into bed, and woke the next morning to find that somehow the boys looked different. Seriously, 22 hours of not seeing them, and I swear to you, they'd grown. How can that be?  

And this morning, as I stood in the shower and rinsed the last bit of Lake Erie sand out of my hair, I smiled and thought of next year. 

large garbage day

I know this may seem unusual to some of you, but those three words make me happy. Not because I have so much large garbage to get rid of (though Hubs has TONS) but because our municipalities semi-annual Large Garbage Pickup Day is sort of like a treasure hunt for me. (and I know there are enough of my fellow garbage pickers/thrifters/junk hounds/cheapskates out there reading this that I don't have to feel too apologetic about it)

Because you can't just put a couch out on the side of the road around here in Small Town Ontario any time you like, as they do in Montreal. No sir, people around here gotta wait to dump an old beauty like this.

Though the official pickup was not until Tuesday night, large piles of unwieldy junk were already showing up on people's curbs on the weekend. 

And so, on Sunday afternoon (even though it was raining), Hubs and I packed the boys into the car, emptied the trunk, grabbed the camera and headed out for a tour of the local subdivisions. 

Hubs picked himself up a few things, a weed whacker, (for parts to fix his other broken picked-up-at-the-roadside weed whacker, don't even ask me how loudly I sighed and rolled my eyes at that one!), some random storage boxes and workshop-y things etc.

I myself did not pick up anything, because I was on the hunt for couches to take pictures of. For example, I would not drive by a scene like this one...

...without stopping to check out and admire the lovely mix of colours and patterns. 

I'm not even sure exactly what it is about this mish-mash of florals in these particular hues that makes me happy. (Blue mattresses and orangey-green couches. Check and check) But somehow, awhile back I started to take pictures of abandoned couches and now its sort of a collecting habit with me, and you know how that goes. At least I don't bring the actual couches home with me. Pictures are enough.

There is something about these rejected couches and used up mattresses that is melancholy and nostalgic and sadly humorous and gross all that the same time. A sort of abject sentimentality that I just have to stop and admire for a moment. 

This lovely one was to be found in one of the older neighborhoods in our little town. I like to hit a good mix of housing eras when looking for treasure/junk/images. One part postwar, one part eighties boom, one part newest-development-in-town. You usually get several quite different strata of junk, though there are always exceptions. 

And eventually the rain ended, though the puddles remained. Our trunk was full of Hubs' new finds, and my memory card was full of pictures. And the patient little boys in the back seat had paged through all their books and eaten all their snacks and it was time to take them home for naps. It won't be the last time they drive around to look at junk with us, that's for sure. 

 

barns, part deux

I posted awhile ago about my friend Stephen coming up for a visit and going out for a drive in the country to take pictures of barns. Well, this is the second half of those pictures. I won't go on about it in text (as I usually do) because I'm really crunching towards a deadline this weekend and should be spending my evening (and the next one, and the one after that) at my sewing machine. But I didn't want to leave you with nothing, so I'm going to do what I don't usually and make this a mostly picture-full, text-less post. Though you can see how hard that is for me. Because I'm still writing. No, tonight the pictures have to do that talking for me so I can go back to cutting and pinning and cussing about how I always leave things to the last minute. ahem.

Enjoy this little barn. I drive by it every time I visit my parent's place and it always draws my eye. It just feels like I needs a story somehow. So now you can look at these pictures, and make your own story to go with it. 

First five photographs by me, and the last three are by Stephen Altena (obviously, as I am in them). Thanks again Stephen!