How Do You Expect Me to Choose?

Simon wanted to hold Ian, so of course I grabbed my camera.  The impromptu little photoshoot only lasted a couple of minutes (if that) and still I ended up with fifty-seven shots of the boys—and it would have been many, many more if I hadn’t paused to pull Simon’s fingers out of Ian’s mouth and to make sure he wasn’t twisting his little brother’s neck. When I loaded the pictures into iPhoto, I quickly, and relatively painlessly, ditched twenty-four of them—some were obviously too blurry, some were nearly identical to the ones before or after, and in some both of the boys had a dippy expression or their eyes closed. But that still left me with thirty-three, and even though there were several different Simon-handling-Ian configurations and even a prop thrown in there, in the end those thirty-three shots were all pretty similar to one another. I really did like each one for various reasons—a cute expression on Simon’s face in one or on Ian’s in the next, Simon sniffing Ian (and declaring him “stneetnchy” [stinky]) even though years from now I won’t remember that and I’ll think he’s just kissing him, the normalness of a random Wednesday morning in June. I ended up narrowing it down a bit more, but even though I put (just) five on Flickr, I kept eighteen on my computer. I just couldn’t part with one more.