My First Blog Post: Shawcroft Family at Penitente

“But if you call me Anne, please call me Anne spelled with an ‘e’,” pleaded Anne Shirley over the speaker of our family car.  My 12 and 14 year old girls were trying to ignore the voice, and sleep in the back seat.  The four year old, that was supposed to be taking a nap, was complaining that she wanted to go home and would rather listen to music.  My good husband, who agreed with our daughters about my choice of entertainment, was none the less excited to be on this adventure.  I had told him I needed to go location scouting and he decided that was a great excuse to go somewhere he had always wanted to go, but had not.  After an hour of driving, and a few wrong turns, we found the trail head to the Penitente Canyon.  I had no idea what to expect, but what I found was areas of large rock interspersed with beautiful greens cascading over the trail.  My youngest called it the jungle, but much of it reminded me of the desert.  My older two girls woke right up and ditched the “this is boring” attitude fast as they became self proclaimed rock climbers.  My husband was in heaven, as he always is in the outdoors, and I kept losing my family as I stopped to photograph just one more thing.  All of this made me proclaim with excitement, “This is where we can take our family pictures!”  So my family knew we would be heading back soon but at that moment, they were ok with it.

Fast forward a few weeks.  The girls and I have taken three whole hours to get ready and we are running a little behind.  My youngest has not had a nap, and I can’t even bribe her with the promise of a snack if she smiles because I forgot to bring any!!  Five minutes into the photo shoot my four year old is bawling and we have to let her sit to the side and let her cry while my husband gets a shot of me and my older girls.  We were able to get her happy eventually and get a few pictures of her, right before she did a very graceful head first baseball slide on the trail and ruined her white dress. All this is to say, “I GET IT!!!”  It doesn’t matter if you have one or nine kids, getting everyone ready for, and happy to do family pictures is hard.

That being said, as I look at these family pictures, or any from the past, I am so grateful to have captured my children in time.  Life goes too fast and they grow up too quickly.  My oldest is graduated from high school and moved on to better things, serving a mission for our church in Costa Rica.  He has been gone for almost a year, and some days I can’t even quite remember what life was like with him here.  My oldest daughter just has her high school days ahead before she moves on, and then the next one will grow up.  You could not pay me any amount of money for these precious reminders of my life with my family when my children were just children.  My family pictures are a prized possession and because I know that, it makes it all worth it.