2015 Week 3 Day 4 – The morning after the sleepover went well and Alexei’s friends seemed to leave happy and he was on good form all day too.

In the afternoon Paul took the youngest kids out for a play whilst Barnaby and I stayed in, keeping warm and he did homework whilst I sorted through some girls clothes that I had kindly been given. I recently read a blog by a photographer talking about getting in the picture with her kids; otherwise you may find in years to come that there are never any photos of yourself with the children. It really resonated with me and I followed her advice to position the camera up in the room and set the control to remote to take some pictures. Even though I felt a mess and was so tired, I didn’t want to use that as an excuse. At first, Barnaby was confused as to how my camera kept going off, but after questioning me he worked it out and then made up a story about a camera that automatically took a picture when anyone said “cheese”. He then made me tell this story back to him, whilst he took control of the remote.

When the others came home, Barnaby played the trick of them and took hundreds of photos! They loved it and danced around in front of the camera saying ‘cheese’, although Willow did get very cross with Felix saying it when she was trying to. I am definitely going to do this set up again!