Yesterday I kind of complained about how I was feeling…lazy with my new camera.

I wanted to take better pictures.  I wanted to take different pictures.

Today I decided to do just a small little something about it.   I entered my first picture in one of the informal biweekly contests they hold over at Digital Photography School.   It’s a site I stumbled across a few weeks back.  I’d subscribed to their RSS feeds, and glanced at a few of their articles.  Today I decided to be a little more active.

They apparently hold biweekly contests based on a theme.  This week’s theme is “Shallow Depth of Field”.  In other words, when the stuff up front is in focus and the stuff in back is not.  My entry was a quick, semi-posed shot of one of my daughter’s toys in front of the ruins of my office area.  I’d like to pretend that the vicious alligator puppet was the cause of the ruin behind it, but those of you who know me well would know that that’s yet another lie I could not pull off.

I’ve taken just about a thousand pictures since I got my camera a few weeks back.

So when I didn’t take a picture today to post, I actually didn’t feel that bad.  My stock of pictures was quite robust, after all.  Most of them could be substituted into this post without anyone being any the wiser.

Of course, I’m a lousy liar and I also happened to picture a picture that shows my daughter sliding down a small slide in the childrens’ play area in the Milwaukee airport.  Since I wasn’t traveling today, any lie I’d begin to construct would swiftly fall apart.

I have desire to start taking different pictures.   Most of my pictures so far have been of my daughter.  Given how damn cute she is, it isn’t really all that surprising.  But still, I need to go out and do different things.

Nothing is as blessed or as disturbing to a parent as the sound of silence.

Our friends and I have heaved a collective sigh of relief as the roving destructive dervish that is our collective children go (relatively) still, if just for a moment.   Long enough for people to enjoy perhaps a sentence or two of adult conversation.

In the same day I have held my breath in quiet terror as I stare at my daughter through the door jamb leading into her room as she herself stares out the window opposite her crib.  I stand there, hoping she doesn’t see me, wondering what she’s thinking.

Silence heralds both angelic sleep and demonic destruction.

In rapt silence our children are entranced by the sites and sounds of every day moments, broken only at the end by an excited “Look Daddy!”  In angry silence our children glare at foods that displease them, baths that displease them, cribs that displease them, and parents that displease them.

Silence is a balm.  Silence is a sword.

And silence is broken.  My daughter is awake.

Again, today’s picture was not actually taken by me, though I did take a fair number of them.  I liked this one the best though.

Looking at this shot, you’d have a hard time believing that our little angel can be quite…willful when you get right down to it.

Today was not one of her better days, sadly.  There was a fair bit of screaming and falling to the ground and pounding her tiny fists into the ground when things just didn’t go her way.

Disruptions to her normal sleep schedule are not met with good graces.

We didn’t have a plan.  We didn’t have an itinerary.  We didn’t have a bullet-pointed list of items that we wished to accomplish with our children.

We had a thought that we’d go out to the Chicagoland area, and just kind of putz around.  Take in the sights and the shopping and the food that is otherwise unavailable in our humble little town.  Twenty-four hours of living like them thar city folk.  Remembering that at one time we were all actually city-folk.

And it’s exhausting.  Towards the end we recounted our accomplishments, and it was quite amazing how much a person could do by doing nothing much in particular.

I should admit that I did not actually take this picture.  It was taken by my camera, and I like it, so I’m saying that it counts.