Back to School Photos

It looks like we may have finally broken the back of our summer heat and Autumn is most assuredly making a welcome entrance. Our summer was spent resting, and playing, and hanging tight around the house with piles of books on the couch. My creative energy seemed sapped by the heat and the end of school drain on my mind- you know that part of the year when everything is on auto pilot waiting for the rescue of summer break, and all you can think of to make for lunches is PB&J? But now, the weather is cooling and the leaves are starting to change, and part of me is perking up and wanting to Create Something.

I have felt in a rut taking pictures and I confess that my camera has stayed in the closet more often than not this summer. But I signed up for a Photoshop Grunge course and I'm super excited. It's all about creating layers and art in a really unique way, and I'm looking forward to experimenting with some new avenues of photography.

Back to school photos: I let the kids pick something they wanted to express about themselves and then we came up with a location that fit with that. Aidan wanted his skateboard and Chloe wanted something to represent her artistic side, so we went with paintbrushes. We scouted around downtown Denver and found a lovely place with lots of funky graffiti.

The first day that we went I managed to forget my camera's memory card at home. That was brilliant. But on the sunny side, we found an awesome coffee shop, Crema, and drove back home properly fortified with an iced latte.

Aidan is in that camera shy stage where he avoids all attempts to take his picture. But this is where the beautiful thing about taking your own kids' photos comes in to play-I know exactly the sort of bribery to use...

This is the part of the story where we started saying "bacon covered squirrel!" because if there is anything that Roscoe can't resist, it's a bacon covered squirrel.

Aidan's easy: the price of a smile can be bought with the promise of bacon. And it helps to have a goofy sis behind me pulling out all the stops to make him laugh.

Chloe works for cupcakes. Sheesh, you'd think I never feed my kids meat or sugar...okay, well maybe that is kind of the truth.

The sign above the car read "Asshole's Garage" and informed us that trespassers would be shot. But since we weren't actually touching anything I figured we were safe enough. They are laughing because, according to Chloe, I was doing something weird. (Which if you ask my children, might be more commonplace than they would like.)