True colors

A few weeks ago, Rowan got out of bed and pulled on a pair of black leggings.  Over the leggings she layered grey and hot pink athletic shorts, into which she tucked a hot pink sleeveless shirt before hiking those shorts up to a location not even in the general neighborhood of her waist.

She then proceeded to eat breakfast and go to school.

Although my mom pondered for a moment staging a fashion intervention, she elected to bite her lip.  In part because she believes that the older we get, the more space and freedom we need to express our unique personalities. And in part because, after spending six months in vain trying to convince Rowan that hiking your socks up over your leggings is not really "a thing," my mom doubted she could make much headway in the 30 minutes before we had to leave the house.

It was in this spirit that my mom agreed to execute upon Rowan's decision to paint her new big-girl room pink, despite the fact that it would stand out just a skosh amongst the warm and neutral tones in the other parts of the house. Making only the vague promise of "pink," my mom set out to find the most subtle, unobtrusive shade on the market.

After deciding that every swatch from the paint store was, in fact, too pink, my mom turned to Restoration Hardware, believing that if anybody could make pink classy, it would be them.  She didn't bother throwing a bit of it on the walls to test it out.  It looked so dignified on that tiny swatch.

Had she bothered to look at a picture of the paint in one of the catalog photos, she would have realized that this pink packed a little more of a punch than she had bargained for.

After the initial shock wore off, my mom smiled, because she knew that Rowan would L-O-V-E it.

Subtlety's never been Rowan's thing anyway.

The Big Reveal

"Open your eyes, Rowan!"

P.S. My mom's camera unfortunately/fortunately distorted the color on the walls, ironically making it appear exactly like how my mom had hoped it would look.  My mom did some clumsy Photoshopping to show what the colors really look like, so you'll have to excuse the fact that it looks like our painter cut in the edges with a blindfold.

Deconstructing the Halloween photo

Halloween is one of those holidays that comes with the expectation of a great family photo.  It started out easy enough.

Dad takes direction well, I've always been very easygoing and there was only one baby to be wrangled.

2007

2008, piece of cake!  Endeavoring to eat a Kit Kat with the wrapper still on kept me busy long enough to get the job done, and there remained only one baby to manage.

2008

The following year, I was old enough to take simple directions and, though we added a baby to the mix, a harness and pacifier assured our success. 

2009

Halloween 2010 fell shortly before the start of the Terrible Twos and Rowan was feeling particularly chipper with the promise of candy in her immediate future.

2010

In 2011, Rowan was closing in on three and I was almost five, so capturing a semi-decent picture wasn't one of our more difficult feats.

2011

In 2012, we welcomed another baby into the mix.  While her inability to crawl made it possible to squeeze the three of us into a single frame, it did nothing to improve the odds that any one of us would look reasonably decent.  We have several photos from 2012, and this was really the best of the worst.

2013

This year, Halloween fell shortly after two separate sessions with our family photographer -- both of which my mom described as "extremely painful" due to the fact that 2/3 of the kids in this family are particularly opinionated in terms of what they are and are not willing to do. 

Factoring in the rainy trick-or-treating conditions and Rowan's refusal to wear her Halloween costume due to the fatigue of already wearing it THREE WHOLE TIMES, my mom didn't even pretend as if she was attempting the group shot this year. 

Which explains why this year's "official" Halloween photo is delivered in six separate installments.  Because on Halloween, we can pretend to be many things, but "cooperative" is apparently not one of them.