Gemma's One Year Photo Shoot

After debating whether or not to take Gemma to a portrait studio for some one-year photos, or hire a photographer, we decided just to attempt a DIY photo shoot.  Cy said that he likes the pictures that I take better than most of what he has seen professional photographers do, so I agreed to take the pictures if he would be my assistant and help keep Gemma situated, smiling, and keep her from crawling off.  This weekend, we finally had the time to go do it.  I suggested Old St. Andrews Parish Church as a location - they have really beautiful landscaping, a pond, a bridge, and benches.  I wish we had been able to get out there while the azaleas and daffodils were still blooming, but maybe it was good that they were not, as the subject of the photo shoot was Gemma, and I would definitely have gotten distracted by all of the pretty flowers (I did end up taking a few pictures of some water lilies). 

Anyway, the photo shoot seemed to go well.  She was fairly cooperative with being dressed up and posed early in the morning, and out of about 100 shots, we got 10 really good ones, which seemed like a decent success rate with a one-year old subject.  :)

There were also some funny "outtake" photos too (which were actually Cy's favorite):

So the photo part of the shoot was a success.  However, we might as well have spent the $$ on a professional since the photo shoot necessitated a trip to urgent care for me.  Right before we were about to head home, a bug bit me right beside my eye.  I brushed it off and didn't think much about it, but not long after we got home, Cy pointed out that it was swelling a bit.  All of a sudden, my eye was swollen completely shut.  I started knocking back tons of Benadryl and icing my eye, and while it eventually quit getting worse, it did not start getting better.  When I woke up Sunday morning (about 5 rounds of Benadryl and 24 hours later) there was still no improvement, so we went to the nearest Doctor's Care where they fixed me up with a nice cortisone injection in my hip.  A few hours later, the swelling finally started going down.  As of this morning, my eye is still fairly swollen but is much better.  I guess it will just take a few days for it to get all the way back to normal.  Lucky me.  But in the end, it was totally worth it, because we were very pleased with how the pictures turned out.  Now I just need to do any touching up and then make the difficult decision of which prints to order!