Friends and family have been chastising us for not getting more photos of the little man online so here are a few from his first Easter.  Now, for those of you from the South, you’ll understand this without me having to explain.  For those who aren’t, let’s just say that Southerners love their traditions and we must carry them out, even when it’s silly.  It’s our way.  Silly traditional must #1 – Every child gets an Easter basket on Easter.  I realize he was only 5 weeks old and completely incapable of understanding that it was a day of any significance or appreciating a single thing in his Easter basket, but I simply had to make one.  I would have felt like a failure of a parent if my child didn’t have an Easter basket on Easter!  So here he is, with his Easter spoils, thoroughly enthralled with his fist…

Silly traditional must #2 – The Easter Outfit.  The night before Easter I tested poor Sean’s patience as we drove around to 3 stores to find the perfect Easter outfit.  I like little man clothes – not baby clothes – and it’s harder than you might think to find something for a newborn boy without a puppy on it.  I did manage to find what I was looking for though.  I spent a ridiculous amount on an outfit that he won’t fit into for any amount of time at all and as of Easter Sunday, the pants fell off of him every time you picked up him, and the socks had disappeared by the time we took this photo, but we had the “little man” Easter outfit!  I couldn’t find a cute newsboys hat to go with it and felt so completely obsessive about having one that I stayed up until midnight making one.  Oh yes – I am that silly about my silly traditions and getting them just right!

Silly traditional must #3 – The Easter Sunday Family Coordination Project.  If you know us at all, you know that we hate matching and so the whole color coordinated family event thing is just so not us. — But it’s tradition! :0)  It’s a must and hence we decked out in all our brown and blue combo glory!  I did at least mix up the hues so as not to look like something straight out of Stepford.  My blue even looks a little more green in these pictures thus saving face slightly for us in the eyes of those who think I’m crazy.  Between you and me though, I assure you we were very matchy-matchy.

We topped off the silly tradition list by going to have a big Easter lunch with my best friend’s family and watching the older kids run around the yard looking for eggs.  It was a perfect first family Easter.  Here we are, for our final Easter traditional must:  the Face-Forward-And-Smile Easter Family Photo – preferable somewhere near a flower bed or on your front porch. :0)  As you can see we are slightly tired and less slightly overweight, but we feel so fortunate to be able to be those things as a family and carry out our first family traditions.

We hope you all had an equally perfect Easter and thanks for letting me share ours with you. :0)  I leave you with my most recent favorite image of our little Seven.  Have a great week everyone! – Mel

Many of you have already heard through facebook, twitter, etc. but for those who have not, we are so happy to announce the arrival of our son!  He came into this world at 1:31am on February 26, 2010 at 7 lbs., 12 oz.  He is perfect if we do say so ourselves! :0)  We are completely thrilled with him – it’s like the year and a half long inhale of breath since losing our first can finally be released.  We finally have our family.

Now something that has not yet leaked into the internet realm as of yet is his name.  It was something we thought a lot about, as I’m sure all parents do.  We wanted it to have meaning, serve as an account of his legacy, and be given with purpose.  To top it off, it needed to be different to pacify his parents’ inner creatives. :0)  We introduce to you Seven Patrick Daniel McLellan.

For those of you who don’t know, Seven was the name of our first son who passed away.  We decided to name him after his older brother so that his memory would be sure to stay with us always and his life would always be acknowledged.  Patrick is Sean’s middle name and SP are also his initials so without making him an outright junior, he is named for his father and can be “mini-SP” for his grandparents.  Daniel is my maternal grandfather’s last name and my paternal grandfather’s first name which made it terribly convenient for us to be able to name him in honor of both of these incredible men with one name.  Finally, McLellan is our last name so of course you would assume it’s just his by default, but what you might not know is that there’s no actual reason for Sean to have been a McLellan at all.  He was given his mother’s stepdad’s last name – the name of a man who would go on to be his father and grandfather when he certainly didn’t have to be.  We are all so proud to take his name and have his legacy continue through our son.  So there you have it. :0)  This is our Seven – incidentally, born in room 7, on the 26th of the month – a day later in the month than the day his brother was born (November 25th).  The page has officially turned and life moves forward with joy at last.

Thank you so much for all the outpouring of love you’ve shown us, through our struggles and our triumphs in the past year and a half.  We have received such amazing support, encouragement, comfort and help.  Thank you especially for all you’ve given us over the past few days.  We have amazing friends and family, and your support has been better than anything we could have asked for.   It made us smile to see all the encouraging comments all over Twitter and Facebook before and after his safe arrival.  It was hilarious to discover that our son had his own Twitter hashtag (#McLellanBaby)!–and it was amazing to see that within hours there had been over 1000 views of the first image of Seven that Mel posted from her iPhone :)

A HUGE thanks to one of our closest friends, Jen Bebb, for flying in all the way from Vancouver, Canada to be there for us, and to photograph our first few moments with our baby.  We’ll share some of those later on, after we get to see them!

A dear friend recently reminded me of a very important truth: we are the custodians of our children and grandchildren’s memories. That got me to thinking.  How many times do we say to ourselves, “oh I don’t need another picture of me” or in some other way pass off capturing our own life as insignificant?  I know I think this way all the time and yet I would kill for photographs of those insignificant moments in the lives of my grandparents.  After their weddings, couples say that they won’t need photos of the two of them for many years now.  Every year when someone older wins a portrait session through the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway, they pass it on to their kids or a friend saying that they just don’t need photos of themselves. Maybe you don’t need more photos of yourself but those photos are not for you. That is the important thing that we all need to remember.

Taking it one step further, here is my biggest conviction from that conversation (can you relate?): we are so careful to back up and re-back up our clients images, but not our own. They’re on our computers here at our house and if someone were to break in and steal those computers, or if a fire claimed our office, all of our personal photos would be gone.  I’m working on changing that right now as we move a copy of all our personal images off-site to be stored with our client images.  This is so important!  If you don’t have a company for off-site storage, at least burn a dvd of your images and take them to a family member’s house.  You just never know and we are the custodians of our children and grandchildren’s memories.  It’s time that we take that to heart.

As our files from the last several years begin their move to off-site locations, here are the most recent images we’ve taken for our children and grandchildren.  I hadn’t really planned to do much with this stage in our life.  After all, I was just pregnant and we know what that looks like.  I don’t really feel like I need another picture of me in this state, but this is for our son and his children, so that they can glimpse back into this insignificant moment in our life and hopefully know us a little better for it.

They’ll know a little better just how much we loved him before he was even born and how much we anticipated his arrival into our lives…

They’ll remember how much new gadgets, like a new remote shutter trigger, fascinate Sean and how funny he can be. :0)

They’ll see how I humored him and those gadgets…

…until I didn’t ;0)

They’ll glimpse the younger selves of their elders, who we are as a couple, and hopefully still see some of this in us all those years later.

Most importantly, we hope that they’ll see love and remember us for it.

We are the custodians of our children and grandchildren’s memories – of their heritage.  No matter how insignificant our life’s moments may seem to us, I plan to move forward both documenting it and preserving it well.  We hope you’ll do the same.