We've been here almost five years now. For all that time, I 've looked at our staircase wall and thought "one day, I'll hang photos there". But, I never could get up the creative energy to actually get in there and get it done.
When David and I were in our first house, the hallway leading to the bedrooms of the little ranch style home was immediately hung with all of our wedding photos; from 5x7's all the way to 11x14's. . As the children were born, some of the wedding photos came down and were replaced with professionally taken photos of our babes. I loved that wall....
Eight years after those wedding photos were first hung, that little house went on the market. David and I re-painted the interior from front to back in preparation for showing the house. Mom, who was a real estate agent, and my Step Mom, Jan, who is an Interior Decorator, both told me that to sell quickly, I needed to limit the personal affects that were displayed around the house....so the photos didn't go back up. Instead, that wall remained bare and lonely for almost a year....
In the next house, I never really found a wall that could handle the photo journal of our life together....a few of the kids formal portraits hung in the short little hallway that our open living house included, but in the 13 years we lived there, most of the photos that had hung in our first home remained in a drawer.
And then, we moved here....and I thought "one day, I'll hang photos there" each time I walked past our staircase wall. Here it is, four years, 8 months to the day later, and I've finally done it. As I said, I just couldn't get the creative energy to get down to the job, until yesterday. I'm still not quite finished with the job, but I'm very happy with the result so far.
I wanted that wall to be a snapshot (or series of snapshots) of our lives together.....in all its imperfection. It hit me that those formal posed shots of my kids and David and I don't reflect our lives together in any way that is real....they don't show the hours we spent rocking those kids to sleep; they don't show the joy on their faces as we blew soap bubbles during bathtime; they don't show Nikki being a big sister to her little brothers, or Dallas being the big cousin to his much younger followers....trips to the beach where training pants were used as hats because someone forgot that hat, or babies wearing Daddy's sunglasses...none of that is reflected in school photos or Olan Mills ones either.
David and I were imperfect parents of imperfect kids....lucky enough to have moments of perfection in our days....so my photo wall is filled with a some imperfect shots printed in black and white and interspersed with some perfect moments....like David and Hunter sharing a good night kiss .....but the best part are those imperfect shots....like the one where if you look really closely, you'll see that David only has one flip flop on as he and Hunter share the last moments of the evening before bedtime....
Back in the day, we used those disposable cameras a lot...and I don't know about you, but a lot of photos cut the heads of folks, or came out really off center despite thinking that I'd held the camera positioned just so....and back in the day, those photographs didn't get put in a photo album or framed....but today, something about their imperfection appeals to me....
So, over the past few weeks, I gathered up frames and spent time going through the bags and boxes of old photos that weren't quite good enough to go in the photo albums. I also went through those photo albums looking for specific photos that had stuck in my memory over time....like the one of Hunter and his first best friend Bridgette peeking through the fence in their underpants...soaking wet from a swim in the little pool.
Right now, the photos aren't in the frames...instead I simply printed them on regular paper in various sizes to be able to see which ones worked best together to achieve the effect I wanted....later this week I'll print them down on photo paper...but, in the meantime, here's a selection of the photos I included....
One shoe on, one shoe off...... and just a little blurry...that funny color? It stayed in the camera (a disposable one) for way too long before being developed....but to me, it just adds to the beauty of it....
When David and I were in our first house, the hallway leading to the bedrooms of the little ranch style home was immediately hung with all of our wedding photos; from 5x7's all the way to 11x14's. . As the children were born, some of the wedding photos came down and were replaced with professionally taken photos of our babes. I loved that wall....
Eight years after those wedding photos were first hung, that little house went on the market. David and I re-painted the interior from front to back in preparation for showing the house. Mom, who was a real estate agent, and my Step Mom, Jan, who is an Interior Decorator, both told me that to sell quickly, I needed to limit the personal affects that were displayed around the house....so the photos didn't go back up. Instead, that wall remained bare and lonely for almost a year....
In the next house, I never really found a wall that could handle the photo journal of our life together....a few of the kids formal portraits hung in the short little hallway that our open living house included, but in the 13 years we lived there, most of the photos that had hung in our first home remained in a drawer.
And then, we moved here....and I thought "one day, I'll hang photos there" each time I walked past our staircase wall. Here it is, four years, 8 months to the day later, and I've finally done it. As I said, I just couldn't get the creative energy to get down to the job, until yesterday. I'm still not quite finished with the job, but I'm very happy with the result so far.
I wanted that wall to be a snapshot (or series of snapshots) of our lives together.....in all its imperfection. It hit me that those formal posed shots of my kids and David and I don't reflect our lives together in any way that is real....they don't show the hours we spent rocking those kids to sleep; they don't show the joy on their faces as we blew soap bubbles during bathtime; they don't show Nikki being a big sister to her little brothers, or Dallas being the big cousin to his much younger followers....trips to the beach where training pants were used as hats because someone forgot that hat, or babies wearing Daddy's sunglasses...none of that is reflected in school photos or Olan Mills ones either.
David and I were imperfect parents of imperfect kids....lucky enough to have moments of perfection in our days....so my photo wall is filled with a some imperfect shots printed in black and white and interspersed with some perfect moments....like David and Hunter sharing a good night kiss .....but the best part are those imperfect shots....like the one where if you look really closely, you'll see that David only has one flip flop on as he and Hunter share the last moments of the evening before bedtime....
Back in the day, we used those disposable cameras a lot...and I don't know about you, but a lot of photos cut the heads of folks, or came out really off center despite thinking that I'd held the camera positioned just so....and back in the day, those photographs didn't get put in a photo album or framed....but today, something about their imperfection appeals to me....
So, over the past few weeks, I gathered up frames and spent time going through the bags and boxes of old photos that weren't quite good enough to go in the photo albums. I also went through those photo albums looking for specific photos that had stuck in my memory over time....like the one of Hunter and his first best friend Bridgette peeking through the fence in their underpants...soaking wet from a swim in the little pool.
Right now, the photos aren't in the frames...instead I simply printed them on regular paper in various sizes to be able to see which ones worked best together to achieve the effect I wanted....later this week I'll print them down on photo paper...but, in the meantime, here's a selection of the photos I included....
One shoe on, one shoe off...... and just a little blurry...that funny color? It stayed in the camera (a disposable one) for way too long before being developed....but to me, it just adds to the beauty of it....
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| From Ava in the garden |
missing half my head..........a common thing during those early years of parenting~
Dallas in his Dad's sunglasses....
Dallas after a morning at church...ready for his nap---notice David's missing half his head too...
Nikki and Dallas sharing a precious moment....not quite half of Nikki's head is missing...and see the laundry on the line in back......a moment of perfection in the midst of life's imperfection.............like my photo wall.............
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