I’ve been really excited to photograph these guys since they listed Friday Night Lights as the best TV show and Pearl Jam as the best band on the contact form questionnaire. Then I completely even forgot to talk to them about it because I was too wrapped up in their awesome house and incredibly good looking selves. This family is adorable! Even Mason, the dog, is handsome and well behaved. Hannah and Sydney, the twins, are 3.5 and full of spunk and amazing dance moves. They’re fraternal twins instead of identical, but it’s pretty difficult for me to tell them apart, and if I were their parents, I’d definitely be dressing them as the twins from The Shining for every Halloween as long as they’d let me. They have Whitney Houston Wednesdays, where they dance around their living room to Whitney Houston songs, but they made an exception this week and moved it to Saturday. Adam and Rachel put the twins on their shoulders and then did some sort of synchronized dip like Olympic figure skaters and it was pretty amazing. So amazing, in fact, that I forgot entirely to talk to them about Coach Taylor.

Are my fellow American blog readers prepared to feel really inadequate when it comes to the number of languages you speak? Good! You’ve come to the right place. Meei contacted us a while back to do a family session with her husband and two daughters. They love the age of their girls and wanted to get it documented (and we agree; 1 and 3 are super fun ages!). We knew that Meei is Chinese, and we knew we’d have about a 5% chance of pronouncing her full name correctly, but she was super nice about our American handicap and told us to call her May. We also knew that her husband’s name was William, so we were 100% confident in our ability to pronounce his name (we were right!). But what we didn’t know is that William is actually Dominican! And William speaks Spanish and Meei speaks Chinese! They met while they were living in New York and they speak English to each other! And William speaks Spanish to the kids and Meei speaks Chinese to the kids and the kids respond in Spanish to their dad and Chinese to their mom and English at school and I’m sorry for all the exclamation points but this is so impressive to an American who took 6 years of French class and forgot everything! Holy smokes. We were and continue to be incredibly impressed by these trilingual kids and their parents. Such a cool family. The best part of our job is meeting people from all over the world and hearing about their experiences. So glad this family got to be our clients this year!

Meet Sasha and Robert! Yes, like Sasha and Bob, even though Robert hasn’t gotten to the point where he’s met Bob yet in the Walking Dead (we told him he needs to catch up and keep going). They have a really cute three-year-old named Cooper who is very enthusiastic, and a very calm and level-headed 5-month-old named Everly. Sasha warned us that Cooper is kind of a ham and would work right away on winning us over, which he did. We were unpacking our gear from the car when he started frantically waving at us from the window of the house.

Once inside, we were immediately bombarded with dogs (Cobie – Terrier, cute. Ollie – Chow mix, cute.) and I went right to work petting them because I can’t resist anything fluffy. Cooper immediately broke us up so that he could show us his room and ask us to read books to him. Sasha warned me that he might try to lock us in his room and keep us there forever, so we were able to outsmart him and stood just outside the doorway… just in case. Later we all woke up Everly and immediately started taking her picture, and while this might be a recipe for disaster for anyone over the age of 12 with any degree of body awareness, it works just fine on babies.

We made cookies! We scootered! We played games! Bug the Cat made an appearance and let me pet him too! It was a successful day all around with no tears except from Everly who insists on standing in an upright position at all times. Look at our success!