Thursday, October 18, 2007

Role Playing

A lot of role playing goes on at our house during the day. Maggie likes to play mom, teacher, Miss Tammy (her gymnastics instructor), doggie, princess, captain of a boat (my bed is her boat and whales and sharks swarm around us), and whatever else catches her fancy that day. Cash has only two roles that he relishes in: leach (where he [literally] sucks the life out of me) and vampire (where he bites anything in sight)- those two roles are often amassed into one painful (on my part) character.

I find myself trying to role play the part of the wife that has a sparkling clean, vacuumed house, dinner on the stove, and not a single unfolded piece of laundry- the domestic diva, if you will. Instead I usually end up playing the part of the partially comatose wife laying on the couch, waded paper towels in my fists and bits of crumbled cheerios in my hair, while my children run around half naked, ketchup smeared across their tiny faces and dirty diapers hanging off their bums...

Today I decided to try on a new "role", if you will... I decided to play the part of photographer and do a "photoshoot" with my children. This is slightly crazy on my part since a) I have no clue how to truly use a camera (you just point and shoot, right?) and b) I know highly talented photographers like Matt Clayton whom I ought to hire to take photos of my offspring. But I decided to give it a shot (ha ha, get it?), and so I stripped my kids out of their breakfast-encrusted pajamas and dressed them in some clean pants and shirts. I combed their hair, brushed their teeth, and set them on the floor of the living room where we had some semi-decent natural light coming in. And then I tried to take some pictures. And I tried to get all "artsy" using this feature on my digital camera where you select a color (I chose the blue from Maggie's jeans) and the camera only picks up that color and everything else is kind of a sepia tone. A pretty cool feature, if you ask me. So here are the fruits of my labors of the day. Needless to say, I won't be professing to be a photographer any time soon.

This is my favorite shot of Maggie, despite the sort of lackluster background:


Here's Cash's "best of":


Here's a montage of the pics of the day:


My children were naturals- meaning they acted natural in front of the camera... no shame:


And here is the pile of laundry that got ignored whilst I was role playing away:


And now I'd better go take care of the above pictured pile of laundry before my husband gets home and jumps at the chance to roleplay his favorite character: "angry, totalitarian leader"...

7 comments:

Bringhursts said...

Right now I'm role playing a couch pillow. I'm totally a natural at it.

Your kids are gorgeous. By the way, Ethan's role is putting anything and everything in his mouth including rocks and trash. He has NO TEETH yet so we're not to the vampire stage quite yet.

Olivia McCord said...

Can you please role play being a photographer around my kids? Your pictures are great, especially b/c they are so good looking. Come visit soon, K?

Olivia McCord said...

my last comment doesn't make much sense. By "they" I mean Maggie and Cash. Kjell and I were role playing movie critics last night, so I didn't get much sleep.

john said...

the phantom post is back! well those are really cool pics. and i love that your camera does that!! john didnt believe me when i said a camera could do that. but im right & hes wrong. i want one that does that though. i really need a new one since mine got a bath over the summer! haha. jk kat. well i do need a new one, but it was starting to act dumb before that day. john didnt believe me when i said a camera could do that. but im right & hes wrong.

Brittany said...

You are so funny, Kat. The pictures turned out GREAT! Well, not that I know anything about photography either, but if I had taken those pictures I would be dang proud! I think my camera is not as fancy as yours, but maybe I'll still have to do a photo shoot of my own one of these days.

Matt Clayton said...

What are you talking about?! These are great!
Speaking of pictures...lets set something up! I've got a great idea for a family picture of you guys. You can pay me in cinnamon toast.

Jen said...

Such cute kids! I love the pictures. I just found you through Bill and Becca... it's so good to catch up and see how you all have been!