opossum

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this will be my only family photo session that begins with the release of a wild mother opossum and her babies!   The Putterbaugh family loves animals without a doubt—they just aren’t in love with the idea of a opossum sneaking into their garage to steal their cat food! 

So, they set a trap intending to catch the male who’d been sneaking in and instead caught his wife and kids!  Last year a opossum was accidentally trapped in their garage and chaos broke out!  Frantic to get out, the opossum clawed a hole in their drywall leading right into their house!  Notice the opposum hissing at Dad?  Carroll County living at its finest!

Wasn’t sure I’d get the whole family on the rope bridge, but actually they were all pretty eager to climb on!   Mom says she wants to take her whole family on Survivor or possibly Family Amazing Race.   Not sure the girls are buying into the plan, unless they can be guaranteed cell phones and hair straighteners, but time will tell!

Family is everything to Mom.  Bonds within her family are strong and laughter comes easily; that was very clear.   She has organized a family photo session every year to try and hold onto a piece of her constantly evolving family.   Let’s just say her girls haven’t been enthusiastic about the annual family portrait and that hasn’t changed as they’ve gotten older.  You can imagine how difficult scheduling a session is around the work schedules of mom, dad and two of the teen aged girls.  Mom joked, ‘I just hope everyone shows up!’ 

Three teen-aged daughters—I think Dad deserves some kind of special award for that.   There’s got to be a country song about that somewhere!  Teen-aged girls have a world that’s all their own which calls very strongly to them and must be very foreign to dads—boyfriends, music, texting, jobs, fashion, friends calling wondering where they are and when they’ll be done getting their pictures taken…

Moms have a world that’s all their own and calls very strongly to them.  They see the years flying by much too quickly and do whatever they can to stop the hands of time.  They see young women who used to be little girls and wonder ‘where did the pigtails and dolls go?’  They have a sense of urgency to preserve the moments that seem to be slipping from their reach.  Each passing year and next milestone their children reach is a loud reminder—I am growing up and will someday leave to begin a family of my own.

The Putterbaugh girls must have some sense of the significance of these photos for their mom, which is why they dutifully submit to them each year.   Although, as any mother can attest, they won’t truly understand the ‘why’ till they have children of their own.   For now they do it out of love.  One day they’ll realize there are things that pull harder on your heart strings then the teen aged world that envelops them now.  One day they’ll realize how quickly time moves and do all they can to freeze moments with their own children…that day will come when Lucinda is a grandmother and watches her girls race around to their own family photo sessions!