It's been a most industrious day, relatively speaking of course, and I'm seriously looking forward to drinking a foaming cup of magnesium, putting on clean socks, climbing under the covers, arranging myself delicately besides Olive, heaving my 15 pound weighted blanket over my legs and reading A Tale for the Time Being for half an hour before putting on my headphones and switching over to my "calm down" audio book (Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, in case anyone was wondering) because it takes THAT MANY STEPS for me to actually fall asleep.
I'm nervous about April. I've planned a lot of photo shoots for this month, including two weekends straight of Mountaintop mini sessions where I just go go go go. I wonder what the weather will be like and if the sun will cooperate and I wonder how Olive will eat on those days.
On the days when I'm not shooting I'll have to spend hours editing, and I hope that Olive doesn't see me working on my computer instead of playing with her and then develop an attachment disorder and all the bonding we've done up until this point will turn to dust, and she'll grow up to work some upper-crust tech job, move far away from home, make a lot of money but never find satisfaction in personal relationships, becoming mildly addicted to Ambien, and forget to call me on holidays.
I love photo sessions, I get all high and jazzed off of them, but before each one I get this pit in my stomach like- what if I somehow forget how to use my camera? What if I get the yips?! That happens sometimes to athletes, they just suddenly forget how to do the most basic motions, like catch and throw. Their brain and body just freeze.
It's called the Yips.
And it's not actually going to happen to me. I just really want to do a good job. I'm learning that photography is all about two things: light and math. And just like with writing, you need to learn the rules and follow the rules for a long time before you've earned the right to break the rules- and when you break the rules, that's when things get interesting.
My cousin Alison sent Olive these duck pajamas today, along with a toy that can really only be described as a confetti-filled hamster wheel on a suction cup, and it absolutely blew her fucking mind. Olive's, not Alison's.
This evening I zipped the baby into her duck suit and she sat there on the living room floor, spinning her hamster wheel with her mouth wide open in shock and amazement, completely captivated, and I realized I was looking at her with the exact same expression, like, how is this possible? Almost half a year with her and she's still too new to be believed. Wasn't I just dreaming her? Wasn't I just sick? Wasn't it yesterday I was gingerly bringing up the very idea of her to her not-yet-dad?
And then- woah- before things got too overwrought I hauled her into car seat and all four of us, dad daughter dog and me, drove a few blocks to this park I discovered today. The park is right across the street from our friends, a famous photographer and his wife who is about to have a baby just about any day now. I hope we make a habit of meeting up in this park in the evening once their little boy gets here, and maybe without being too obvious or annoying I can ask him questions about the light and the math, because he gets it. He gets it, you ought to see his work.
Anyway. I hope that even with all the editing and the long days up on the mountain, I can still write here every day because I think it's been a good thing.