Recently, most of the surprises in our family have been initiated by Andrew while I have been the happy recipient. This Valentines day, however, he had no idea what was coming & I got him good.
While Ieva & I were in the States, I decided to take advantage of a magazine insert that advertised a free sitting & cheap prints for a department store photo shoot. Besides my senior pictures, I've never done the professional photo shoot gig - largely because I think we are capable of taking our own creative photos & all the props & backdrops at the department stores can often get pretty cheesy (in my humble opinion). I decided to take ieva & try it nonetheless, and since she was in a fantastic mood, the results were pretty darn cute. My original hope was that I would be able to pick up the prints before I left to come back to Lithuania, not tell Andrew I did it, and then present him with a beautiful framed photo of his darling daughter on Valentines day. I learned, however, that these places take 7-10 days to process & create prints, so I returned home empty handed...but still didn't tell Andrew we had done it. I wondered if he'd check our bank account online & figure it out when he saw the charge for JCPenny Portrait Studios...but luckily for me, it was only listed online as JCPenny - keeping it nice & ambiguous.
So, the 14th came & I sent Andrew an email with the following as an attachment:
While Ieva & I were in the States, I decided to take advantage of a magazine insert that advertised a free sitting & cheap prints for a department store photo shoot. Besides my senior pictures, I've never done the professional photo shoot gig - largely because I think we are capable of taking our own creative photos & all the props & backdrops at the department stores can often get pretty cheesy (in my humble opinion). I decided to take ieva & try it nonetheless, and since she was in a fantastic mood, the results were pretty darn cute. My original hope was that I would be able to pick up the prints before I left to come back to Lithuania, not tell Andrew I did it, and then present him with a beautiful framed photo of his darling daughter on Valentines day. I learned, however, that these places take 7-10 days to process & create prints, so I returned home empty handed...but still didn't tell Andrew we had done it. I wondered if he'd check our bank account online & figure it out when he saw the charge for JCPenny Portrait Studios...but luckily for me, it was only listed online as JCPenny - keeping it nice & ambiguous.
So, the 14th came & I sent Andrew an email with the following as an attachment:
He didn't get a chance to see it while at work, so when he came home he opened it in front of me. His first reaction upon seeing the photo wasn't "Awwww - how sweet!" or even "Wow - what a great photo of Ieva - how'd you do it?" No. My husband's initial reaction was instead "What'd you do? Cut & paste Ieva's head on to some other baby's body??" Leave it to Andrew to think that there's no way I'd do something as involved as getting a baby photo shoot done without telling him. Once I finally convinced him that the body in the photo did indeed belong to his daughter as well, his next question was about how much I payed for the whole deal...but that's where my replication of our conversation will end. I'm convinced that those department store photographers are trained to take way more adorable photos than necessary so you'll be so smitten by all of them that you won't be able to make a decision & order prints of everything. I didn't order prints of quite all of them...but for an extra $5.00, I was able to get small digital versions of them sent to me electronically so now we can share them with you!
Ieva in her favorite blanket (thanks, Great Aunt Claudia!)
Ieva rolling in roses
Adorable, yes...but can she be any more posed?
The Stave girls
My personal favorite...ieva's really into touching faces these days
