Let’s Do 52! Leaps

When I first heard about The Wonder Weeks, I thought it must be a total gimmick. For those not familiar with the concept, the wonder weeks are age predictable leaps in the cognitive development if infants. They are predictable to the point where you can look at a calendar and know when your child is going to go from sweet and calm to irritable and fussy. Then after the “storm” has passed your child is back to him or herself again but with new cool skills. Despite my hopes that this was all crazy talk it’s been true, yup, my kids have hit every last one of them.

But this isn’t about my kids. I feel like the last week has been a wonder week for me. It caught me completely off guard and I’m not entirely certain I got any cool new tricks out of the deal but I do know that so much happened all in my mind that I don’t even know how to put it to words. It’s been a week of leaps and joys and let downs and excitement and sadness and more changes to come– some wonderful and some not so wonderful. I have long relied on my brain/finger connection to help me understand what I’m feeling (whereby my brain tells my fingers what to write almost without conscious effort or thought). In fact there have been times when I go to reread what I have written and can’t even remember writing it. I swear there is some sort of odd connection there. But I’ve been sitting at the keyboard on and off all week and I don’t know what to say and if it seems like I’m being cryptic I don’t mean to be. I just don’t really get it myself.

I guess it comes down to this. I feel like I’ve maybe finally started to learn and be confident in who I am except maybe not confident enough to hold on to it in times of doubt. I think it has a lot to do with this time I’ve spent not working. Really I’ve spent a lot of the last 14 months relatively alone except for my immediate family and I’ve had the chance to be me, just me, without the influence of anyone else. I attended a teacher training on Friday and was around my coworkers again and I felt like I wasn’t the same person anymore but that I was maybe trying to act like the old me. Then I saw a ton of old friends from College yesterday and, reflecting a bit on how I felt I’ve changed, I got there and realized that the new me is really just an older version of the old me. And even knowing what I mean by this I don’t get it so bless you if you’ve read this far and YOU get it! I just don’t know how you hold on to the you you want to be. How do you keep yourself from being pulled in a million different directions from the world around you? How do you remain strong and resist the urge to be swayed by all the opinions out there? I don’t know. That’s the question I’m trying to answer.

In the mean time, since that has nothing to do with Let’s Do 52! Let me explain the picture. I wanted to try out some trickier lighting situations, work with spot metering, and intentional overexposure. I think I waited too long into the day and ended up with not enough light at all. I also got a very cute, very out of focus picture that I still love and I’m going to post that below. I think in the past I wouldn’t have posted it but yesterday I was talking to my friend about this exact sort of thing and he reminded me of the importance of not caring how other people will critique my pictures and to stick with the ones I have an emotional attachment too. (Thanks TJ!) So that’s the one below 🙂 I am going to keep working on this because I see the image that I want to capture in my mind, I just have to make it come through on the camera. I may be happy with who I am but I still see a lot of room to grow.

Until next week!

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