The problem with being the photographer’s kid is that she’s always taking pictures of you when you least expect it. The other problem with being the photographer’s kid is that those pictures get transferred onto her computer into a large folder called “Edit Me…now!” and then they get forgotten about for almost a year while she falls into the flurry of wedding season, fall family photos shoots, and then two straight months of tax preparation, photobook design, website updating, and archiving. But then one day, she’ll load that folder into lightroom, open up those images and nearly weep at how you’ve grown. All the while, you tug at her pantlegs and wonder why the heck she’s looking at you on a screen when you’re standing right beside her. Ahh, the travails of being the photographer’s kid.
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These photos span the course of two weeks during our travels in England last May. Marty’s family is from England and although we’d spent the year and a half following Cove’s birth shortening the miles between us with photos and messages, we thought it was high time we bring him over to greet the homeland and meet his dear Great Granny and the aunts, uncles, and cousins that were so familiar to him from the photos we’d shown him daily.
As we crossed the Atlantic and Covyn slept soundly on my chest, his daddy on one side and his grandad on the other, I was filled with the same anticipation for him to meet his family as I had carried fifteen years ago on my first visit to England to meet them. What follows are just a few higlights from our trip and I couldn’t be more grateful that I made the choice to forego cell shots and lug a heavy camera and lenses through England as Martyn and I introduced our boy to the folks we hold so near and dear. Now I can look back and forever experience the joy of my little dude waking up wide eyed and full of wonder at the day ahead. I can remember him as he explored the back roads near Rowland’s Castle, conversed with horses on the roadside, splashed in puddles on wobbly legs, strolled beside the Slipper Mill Pond in Emsworth, romped through the clovers on the Isle of Wight, and muddied himself on the shores near Afton. But my favorite moments are the ones that happen in between: the one where he’s sitting on his Great Granny’s knee as she laughs with pure delight as he squirms off to explore something in view that’s caught his eye; the moments at the end of long, happy days when the activity slowed and his Nana and Grandad playfully helped bathe him in a clawfoot tub far too large for a boy his size; meeting his Auntie Nesta and Uncle John for the first time and learning that they are just as lovely and kind and warm as his mommy and daddy had told him they were; seeing his cousin, Alva Doe, wrap her arms around his neck in total rapture as he learns from her how to pound the keys on her piano (after a breakfast of hot cross buns, of course), or watching them jump together on Alva’s bed as the evening light pours through the windows onto their little blonde heads.
These are the moments. This is life.
