A Big Texas Howdy . . . the Rest of the Story

I had great plans for this blog post. I tossed around which item I wanted to use as the finale to my Summer Wardrobe sewing and eventually decided that since we do live in Texas and my boys are big fans of cowboys, I’d go with the D&G Howdy PJs. I had this whole cute photo shoot idea planned out with both boys playing around the rocking horse, the rocking horse I borrowed for a photo shoot ages ago, the one that’s still sitting in my living room even though I said I’d only need it a day or two . . . I digress. (I really am going to return your rocking horse, Kelli!) We dressed the boys in their new jammies right after we’d cleaned up from dinner, and I grabbed the camera.

As is fairly normal, the whole family joined in to help with pictures. Usually when we take pictures of both little ones together, I crawl around on the floor with the camera while Ray or Samantha grabs Charlie, plops him down in place and reminds Jamie to stay put where he is. Then I snap as many pictures as I can before Charlie runs out of the photo frame. Most of the pictures look like this:

or this:

Lately, Jamie’s decided that he should “pose” for the camera, so we often have several like this one:

and this one:

Sometimes there’s dancing on the furniture:

Frequently, there’s an argument over something. Tonight Jamie let Charlie wear his cowboy boots.


Unfortunately, Charlie was not happy when it was time to give the boots back to Jamie.

I do occasionally lose my patience a bit with all this. Tonight, though, I laughed until I cried. Really, they’re kids, doing what kids were designed to do. I just went with it. 76 pictures later, the one at the very top of this post is the only one that I thought, “What a nice picture!” The rest, though, they’re the ones that are real life around here, and they’re the ones that years from now, I’ll look back at and laugh again. And that, as Paul Harvey always said, is the rest of the story. (You totally just said that like Paul Harvey in your head, didn’t you?)

Oh, and lest I forget, I finished both boys’ summer wardrobes! I’ll be back with a recap of everything sometime tomorrow.

Finally, for the record, this is the easiest way to get one- and four-year-old boys to pose in their mama-made pjs: