Babies on a blanket

Jude and I always look forward to our Thursday morning's "Mom's Group" at my friend Annie's house. There are about eight of us mom's that get together weekly to hang out together, let babies play together (well, between all of the napping and eating and changing) and there's usually some sort of food involved for us moms, thanks to Annie's gifted hospitality.

Yesterday we said goodbye to one of our good friends, Katie, and her beautiful daughter, Abigail. Katie's husband serves in our military (thank you for helping to protect our country!) and she and Abigail were going cross country to be reunited with him. (Yay!) It was bittersweet. (photo of Abigail crawling in Annie's kitchen)

Annie thought it would be a neat idea to photograph the kids together before they left, so we "plopped a bunch of babies" on a blanket in the front yard and did a quick 5-10 minute photo shoot. :) (Don't you just want to kiss their little cheeks? They're all so adorable!)
Photographing several babies at one time is no easy task! I think the whole neighborhood heard us moms hollering at the kids to "look over here!". In these photos you mostly just see the babies all looking in one direction (with some occasional smiles) so the pics kind
of lack spunk. But Julia is one of the happiest babies I've ever met and she was just smiling away! :) (Isn't she sweet?!)

Also, I learned a lot from that little mini-shoot about my lighting. I was dealing with harsh sunlight (almost noon) and I made a terrible mistake of back lighting the kids in our first pictures. I figured I'd deal with it later because once you get 8 or so babies on a blanket you don't want to say to all the moms, "hmmm, do you mind if we move everyone over here?" We did eventually turn all the babies around, but I should have had everyone face west and I should have pointed my camera east. Live and learn. That's what I'm here to do. :)
























Here are Cade and Jack. They are good buddies. Both about 2 1/2 yrs. old. And they are both great big brothers to their siblings.

Below is Johanna. She has so much personality! Here she is showing off her clapping skills and hamming it up with her mom Katie. So many cute babies!!