“I’m a baby bear, you’re a momma bear, and Papa’s a papa bear,” says Iris.

“And what is the baby?” I ask.

“He’s an alligator,” says Iris, without hesitation.

We named him Akiva.

Iris, Joshua, & Ben at the Shelburne Museum

One of my favorite photo series with Iris was during last year’s strawberry season:

Le Conte de la Princesse de Fraise

The light was so golden that morning.

This year, I am so busy. I am unable to plan for golden hour.

I plopped Iris in the shade when I had a moment with just her and the camera.

How my little girl has grown!

We set up the pool.

As soon as the water was a couple inches deep, Iris said, “I want to go fimming! I want to go fimming!”

Her big plan is to have a pool party and invite all her friends and put the pool on wheels and push it around the block.

I think she spent too long watching the neighbor’s pool party.

The water was pretty cold.

Baby Boy.

We went down to the rocks so Martin could take some pictures of me with an overflowing belly of baby. He has not touched a camera more than a handful of times in his life, so I gave lots of instructions. For some reason, he understood that the entire subject matter needed to be inside the tiny focus rectangle at the center of the screen. The good thing about this is there is definitely no chopping off of body parts and it certainly leaves a lot of room for re-composing the photo by cropping and generally what you want to be in focus will be in focus. Luckily my camera has a relatively large sensor, allowing for LOTS of enlargement of an extreme crop. Thank you, Papa!