Say Cheese...or, just sit there

Our experience getting Olivia's 7 1/2 month professional photos taken is too funny not to share. As most of you know, Olivia is not exactly doling out the smiles on a regular basis. She is a very contemplative and serious baby and if you want to see that sweet little grin, she makes you work for it, and sometimes she makes you work hard. On the day of her photos, she just happened to be in one of those "I'm not going to smile" moods. I put her in her first outfit which was the purple tutu in the photo above and we set her in the middle of this huge studio floor where Christy, our photographer, bustled around getting the lighting and everything ready. She started to snap photos and Olivia just sat there holding her tutu with each hand staring at Christy with this super gloomy, pouty "why am I here" face. For a good 20 minutes Matt, Christy and I danced, cartwheeled, sang, clapped and made fools out of ourselves trying to get Olivia to smile but alas, she did not find our attempts at all amusing. We ended up calling it a day when we put her in outfit #2 and she had a complete meltdown. We did go back on another day to take a few more shots and had much better results. The above photo was taken on the original day when we were out of ideas so Christy gave her some pearls to try and entice her to smile. It didn't work, but we ended up thinking this one was pretty cute too even without the smile :)