portraits schmortraits

So, it has recently been the case that when we get Noah up from a nap, he awakes only to give us a big smile. When we pick him up and talk to him, we get another series of smiles, from smirks to half smiles to full smiles to open-mouthed grins. During diaper changes? More smiles.

So you're saying to yourself, "I've seen people smile before - big deal!" But this kid has a real *winning smile* I tells ya - it makes the smiles of the kids in our baby magazines look like mere slack-jawed gawking. You'd really just have to see it. The trouble is, you can't. Why, you ask? Because the shutter-speed of our camera moves at the speed of a tectonic plate, that's why. We just can't capture it. Every time we try to snap a picture of him smiling at us with our digital camera, we end up with sleepy lids and a grimace, or an utterly dead-pan stare, as if we were trying to prove to the world that a baby can indeed give a convincing impersonation of a stroke victim or a catatonic schizophrenic.

Naturally, our solution was to take him to a department store and get some portraits done to document the magnificence of his beaming visage. (We had a coupon!) So today we went to JC Penny and took every precaution to make sure Noah was in a good mood before we actually sat for the photos. He had a nap, a nice "meal" (only one course, obviously, but still), and we walked him around the mall a bit.

As soon as we crossed the threshold into the sitting room where the pictures were to be taken, he went from a serene and even inquisitive countenance to shrieking hysterically like a banshee, or what I imagine it sounded like when a pterodactyl stubbed its toe. If you're not really into Irish lore or popular depictions of dinosaur sounds, maybe it will put things into perspective to realize that he didn't scream *nearly* as much when he got his vaccines. For some reason, he thought sitting on a pillow with some nice lady taking pictures of him was much worse than being pinned to a table by a strange man sticking three one-inch needles into his soft quaking flesh. Whenever either of us held him in our arms to get a picture, he reacted as if just prior to picking him up we had dipped our arms in boiling glue and plunged them into a bucket of broken glass.

But guess what? We ended up with some pretty good pictures. He wasn't smiling in any of them, but neither did he have the unbridled anguish on his face that he seemed to exhibit the entire time we were sitting for the pictures. How is that possible given what you've just said above, you ask? (You're really not asking any of these things, I realize). Well, apparently the benefit of having pictures taken with a professional grade camera is that the shutter speed is faster than a proton in a large haldron collider. So in between one red-faced howl and the few nano-seconds when he was winding up for the next one, his face would look normal, and our photographer managed to catch a few of those fleeting frames. It's a good thing that for him "normal" = super-cute, so we wound up with some fairly good pictures! Here's to hoping we can get him to smile next time around ...