This past weekend saw us make the 6 hour drive back to Maine to check on the house, clean out the fridge and the chest freezer and make some decisions about the monumental pile of crap that's stacked to the ceiling of our large two-car garage.
OK who am I kidding? When we actually got there, we managed to spend a total of maybe 4 hours back at the house and the rest of the time at the waters edge, throwing glacially cold pebbles and rocks into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Alright alright...you've caught me again! Gaby and Gareth stood around throwing rocks into the water whilst I had my camera aimed at just about everything in my line of sight. But at least I wasn't the only idiot outside, in subzero temps, cursing at the cold and the havoc it was wreaking with my shutter speed...
Personally, I can't throw anything, be it a rock or a ball, to save my life. Gaby has inherited her daddy's penchant for tossing and skipping stones. I'm better off with a camera in my hands vs. a pebble or rock...take my word for it. If you don't believe me, just ask Tammy Davis whose tooth I knocked clean out of her head back in the 2nd grade, with a ... that's right, a rock. I was aiming at a hill behind her. Need I say more?
When she wasn't flinging stones into the icy indigo depths of the ocean, Gaby was goofing off with her favorite person in the entire world...her daddy!
Gareth tried, unsuccessfully, to get a picture of her and I together. Between the freezing blasts of wind coming off the water and Gaby trying to put snow down my back, it just wasn't happening!
As always, I tried in vain to get a photograph of Gaby where she was looking directly at me and not off to the side. One of these days I'll get it through my thick head that whenever she sees me with the camera she does the exact opposite of what I want her to do. I need to tell her to look at my shoes and maybe she'll look at the camera for once.
I just wanted one little winter 2010 photo. Just one. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, if you're 4, and there are mounds and mounds of freshly fallen, powdery snow to jump into, it is.
"Gaby, can you look right at mommy and give me a pretty smile?"
"Ummm, sweets, that's not what mommy had in mind. I just want a pretty smile, just one."
"Errrr, Gabz, that's not what I had in mind. How about a little less tongue, and can you stand up straight? Come on now, look at mommy...look at the camera..."
"OK, well good, you're standing up straight. You sure do have pretty teeth. Can we take a picture to send to Meggy, and show her what pretty teeth you have?"
"Gaby, baby, sweetheart, just one little smile? Right at mommy? Pretty please with sugar on top and maybe a pony too?"
"Gaby, baby, please, my fingers are losing their feeling. Do you want mommy's fingers to fall off? All your school chums will call me 'Nubbins'...do you really want your friends to make fun of your fingerless mommy? If you just look right at the camera real quick for me, I'll buy you a pony and a rocket!"
I think her expression says it all; "This is as good as it gets old lady!"
And now m'dears, I'm off to figure out just where the hell I'm going to keep not just one pony, but two, and to Google NASA and see if I can borrow a rocket.
