kids in their buddies

Well, I hadn't changed my blog header in over three years so I guess it was about time.
If you look at this regularly then you probably already noticed.  About gosh darn time right?
Here is the old one for posterity:

And here is the new:

Really, I have been meaning to do it since we added a new child to our lives, but it just kept not happening.  I sort of missed my window of Nora being a still and cooperative baby as Gus was when I took the old picture.  When I took the old one it was random and on a whim and I just happened to capture both kids at a good moment.  The lighting was perfect, the buddies surrounding them were perfect because they looked perfectly random.  It was one of those moments you just can't plan.  I knew that was the truth, but it only became more clear to me when I tried to recreate it.  Catching three kids a good moment is much trickier.  It took three different photo shoots and I finally just settled on the one you see above.  I didn't like how much Nora is the focus of it, but the boys liked it the best.  Zach also said, she looks just a bit crazy, but I reminded him that she just looks like that sometimes so it is honest.   However, I wasn't so honest myself because I admittedly even recruited my dad to photoshop my favorite kid faces into different pictures even though I felt guilty about it.  He was confused about which ones were my favorites because he liked different ones better so I decided that must be the point that God was telling me to just be happy with what I got.  

...

Here are a few outtakes just to give some understanding of how it all went down:

Nora was cooperating here, but we couldn't get the stuffed animals on her fast enough:

She was usually crawling around more like this:

This last one was my other contender for new header, but the boys voted me down.
Gus wins for best face in this one, but I kind of liked Nora and Jimmy a little better in the other one.
It was hard to choose.  You can be honest or reassure me or both.