Breeding

Until fairly recently, our family's focus has been solely on breeding cattle. These days, the human breeding programme is escalating beyond any ones expectations.

I was touched when the youngest of our princes - Keelan, and his wife Madi, asked me to take a few pictures of them in the last days of her pregnancy, to commemorate the bump. This picture was one of the last shots, taken while furiously whirling knobs and dials on the camera - adjusting aperture, and shutter speed, and all kind of things to try and catch them in silhouette, with that amazing sky. Thankfully, they took care of conveying the tenderness part that this shot really needed - I could hardly see them through the viewfinder, and was, at that point, laying flat out on the grass in a most bizarre and undignified position. I'm probably not going to tell you how many shots it took to get this one lovely one. Suffice to say there were more than one on the camera that were immediately deleted because they were completely black.

This precious bump will be Grand baby number three for us, and another one, due in a couple of months, will make four, in just over a year. People around us seem to think this is some kind of amazing turn of events - I guess going from no grand kids to four so quickly doesn't happen to everyone!

It's a tremendous joy and privilege to watch our sons make their families... and this grandparent thing is the sweetest gig ever! I have to confess though, that while I adore these little babies, there is a part of me that's itching to paint and draw and create up a storm with these tiny humans... right now though, Payton, who is 14 months is only interested in eating the sidewalk chalk, and Levi, at 4 months is a long way from even being interested in it at all... so I guess I'm going to have to be patient, and make the most of the wonderful photo opportunities in the meantime. Looking at this photo is occurs to me that this would make a fantastic stencil/mask for a journal page. I'll work on that just as soon as I've sung Incy Wincy Spider with Payton (complete with actions)  and snuggled with Levi until he wriggles to a spot with his nose in my armpit... it's his favourite position - go figure!