portrait

Once, many years ago on Mother’s Day, I assisted a few photographers who took an afternoon to photograph several families using an 8×10″ camera. Each family paid around $50 and received one 8×10″ Polaroid. They could choose either b&w or color and I helped the photographers make chocolate (taking the B&W Polaroid neg and sandwiching it with the Polaroid Color positive). Something I learned from my friend Christina who interned at the Polaroid studio in NYC. A pretty special and unique print.
Ever since working that Mother’s Day portrait event I have wanted to do something similar. Mother’s Day is a special day and a portrait of mom’s little ones would be a perfect gift. I know this post is 2 months too early, but it’s never too soon to plan for the most important woman in you life, right? Besides, this is an awesome deal and I’m sure many will take advantage of this opportunity.

If you were wondering, I would love a fancy new camera bag (like this) for Mother’s Day, or a new fixed wide angle lens, and the latest “Healthy Bread in 5 minutes” book (which I just bought yesterday, sorry).

Window in Menton, after we visited the structures made from citrus.

On the way up to the village Eze.

Zed at the chapel in Eze at the end our day there.

Ezra is 4! If you can’t tell, he loves Star Wars. When I asked him what he wanted to do at his party he said: “have sword fights and shoot blasters.” It sounded a lot like what we did last year. So I tried to think of something a bit different for this year. All I could come up with was having Darth Vader make an appearance. Oh, and we had some free play in the yard; intended to be Jedi Training on our ‘space craft’. Half the kids played at Star Wars the other half found the dump trucks.
They ate mini corn dogs (Ezra’s favorite right now) and apples. My attempt at making a Death Star cake totally failed so Zach made some cupcakes and I frosted them to look like a blue double light saber.

Every kid got a costume, but a handful didn’t want to dress up. Then they got to put together their own R2 unite so they could unlock the door and escape the Death Star (our living room) to finish their Jedi Training (play outside). Most were not too interested in making this thing… maybe next year they’ll be old enough for this type of work. The bigger kids loved it.

Each kid got a chance to fight Darth Vader. Even the littlest one loved this, he’s a spit-fire.

For about a year, Ezra prayed for a blue double sword. When Santa finally brought it, he felt it was a bit inferior so we took it back and got a red sword like Darth Vader. In any case, he loved his cake… a full sized, blue double sword.

Ezra was really excited about dressing up like Anakin and insisted on growing his hair long for the party. I tried to tell him he didn’t have enough time to get it long enough, and that we would have to find some fake hair. He finally relented the day before the party and we went to the hair store and got him a nice, long strand of blue hair. I didn’t have time to braid it, but he was so stoked to have his Anakin hair!