Give me a nice shirt picture, I'll give you Madden

A few weeks ago we were driving into our neighborhood on the way home from the beach. Around the entrance to the neighborhood is a lake surrounded by cherry trees in full bloom.  Ben remarked, "those are pretty enough to take a picture."

Light bulb idea given that taking pictures after riding in the car for several hours sounded like a monumentally bad idea.

"If you put on a nice shirt, aka.. nothing with a superhero on it and let me take 10  minutes of pictures by those trees I'll let you play Madden for 20 minutes."  The reality was I was going to let them play video games anyway while I unloaded the car.  To get agreeable pictures at the magic hour with nice lighting was the icing on the cake.

We settled on a tree in full bloom with some low branches to climb on and snapped away.  Granted these are no where near professional quality, but I think they turned out nice.

A few individual shots

I posted this first one of Ian last week on FB and someone messaged me who I had used for pictures.
My reply... ME!

And a couple together

This final shot was my favorite and the way I hope to remember them at ages 4 and almost 8.  Just before I took this picture we were all making farting noises and laughing hysterically in hopes I could catch them in a natural smile.