Finagling Our Fifteen Year Photoshoot
Executive summary: Hubby and I are celebrating our 15-year marriage anniversary this summer, which we managed to commemorate with a photoshoot on Stanford campus, despite the kids being, well, kids.
It’s been 19 years since my husband and I met at college orientation and started dating practically the day we stepped foot on campus two months later. We’ve been married for 15 of those 19 years, which sounds like a lot given we’re “only” in our mid-30s, but we did tie the knot right after college graduation when we were 21, so we had a head start. I don’t remember why I started this tradition, but we’ve been doing an anniversary photoshoot every 5 years, and we just received the photos from our most recent session. Let me just say that doing a photoshoot with a 2yo (who’s deathly afraid of strangers) and a 6yo (who is often as uncooperative as a 2yo) is not an experience I would wholeheartedly recommend, but maybe I’m being too harsh, because it ended up being fine. I warned our photographer repeatedly beforehand to brace herself for the noise and chaos, and told her that I’d be happy if we could walk away with 10 good pictures. Set low expectations, and no one will be disappointed, you see. To give ourselves a little more insurance, we also scheduled the photoshoot for a weekend when grandma would be in town, for some backup adulting in the background. Thankfully, the session didn’t turn out to be a disaster, and the kids were in generally good (albeit loud and overly energetic) spirits. They actually had a lot of fun running around in front of the camera, and our photographer had a few tricks up her sleeve to put them at ease. It’s still hard to find a single full family photo where everyone is looking where they should and not making bizarre faces, but overall I’m very happy with the result. Which, I should add, is a lot more than 10 pictures. (Now just imagine these photos overlayed with the soundtrack of shrieking and thudding and nonstop frog impersonations.)
Looks serene, felt and sounded like a madhouse.
I chose to have the photoshoot on Stanford campus, which the kids are used to going to on weekend afternoons for walks, so maybe that also helped ease things. We’ve moved many times over the years, so we’ve been in a different city (state, actually) for every photoshoot thus far. Our 5-year anniversary occurred while I was getting my MBA at MIT (and hubby his postdoc), so that’s where our photos were taken. At 10 years, we were in Princeton, where hubby was a professor and I was based out of McKinsey’s NJ office. Now at 15 years, hubby is about to start at Stanford and we just moved into faculty housing. Maybe for our 20-year photoshoot, we’ll need to go back to Berkeley, where it all started. And maybe the kids will be calmer by then and not shout “I want my mommy!” or “ribbit!” every 10 seconds … how many white hairs am I away from that day?
Photo credits to Patricia Rossi Photography