Annie is used to being in front of the camera, not really sure I can say she likes it, but she’s in front of one constantly. As you can and will see from the MANY photos I post, we literally have thousands of pictures of her. However, it’s frustratingly rare that I can catch her radiant smile with her looking right at the camera. Don’t get me wrong, we have hundreds of pics with her smiling, we just catch it when she’s interacting with someone else, she just doesn’t cooperate for camera. Either she’s sick of that big black flashing machine in her face or she’s just bashful in front of the lens. Whatever it is, it’s really hard to capture her smiles. She really does smile a ton throughout the day, just not for the camera!

She’s even worse for video. Every time Annie discovers a new trick, we run to get the camera to try to catch it on video. And every time we turn that blinking light on, she stops and just stares at us. Once I can figure out how to add video to my posts, I’ll show you what I mean. We’ve tried to catch her rolling over, laughing out loud, holding her bottle and drinking all by herself, passing a toy from hand to hand. You name the trick, we’ve tried to catch it! We have endless amounts of videos with Annie just pausing whatever she is doing, turning her head to the camera, quiet and staring blankly. The only background noise in these videos is usually from her mother, laughing “damn it (pardon my french), missed it again! Why won’t you do anything for the camera? You have family across the ocean who want to see what you’re up to!”

Needless to say, we have quite the photo (and pretty boring video) collection. We treasure them all, but when we catch that smile with her looking straight into the camera, it’s GOLD.