Proactivity: Lacking

Plague report: Improving. Monkey's eyes were less red today, there was less gunk all round, and Mabel's never even went pink at all. (Which is just as well because she won't let the eyedrops anywhere near her. Her brother is a model patient by comparison. Four-year-olds are better than two-year-olds, sometimes.) I'm hoping that if we can get through tomorrow symptom-free, Monkey can go back to school on Thursday. Oh please oh please.

Other-things report: Hmm.

I'm not, by nature, a very proactive person. I mostly prefer to let events come to me than to seek them out. My best friend, frustrated by this aspect of my otherwise stellar personality, once told me that I'd never find a job ad in the paper headed "Maud: This is your job." (She was right.) How important something is to me can be measured directly by how much effort I put into making it happen rather than sitting back and expecting it to ensue on its own.

I'm hoping that next year, for example, when Mabel is at school three mornings a week and I start thinking that paid work might be a good thing, all my networking and musings and hint-dropping and LinkedIn-updating (and blog-posting, even) will just come together to produce a lucrative and time-efficient freelancing business without my having to actually go out and get a job. We will see whether this pans out or whether I have to start reading job ads and applying for things that do not have my name already on them. (I'll answer to Maud or my real name. I'm not picky.)

Anyway. I'd been thinking for a while that it would be nice to get some real photos taken of us all, while the kids are in the cute stage and before I start ageing completely gracelessly [whole sidebar post on ageing could go here, but I'll spare you]. I enjoy wielding the camera, and now and then I get a good shot of one kid or the other, or even both piled up on my husband - they're stackable, you know. But that means I'm in about ten percent of our family photos, and when you disregard (that is, when I delete) the ones with a double chin or my terrifying profile (terrifying to me: you didn't know my granny so you can't see how my scale model of her nose is disconcerting, to say the least) or that make me look like a middle-aged Irish housewife (howrya, Biddy) or a forbidding schoolmarm, there's not a lot left that I like. And I realised that the longer I put it off, the more middle-aged I'm going to look, because that, sadly, is the direction in which time marches.

But I didn't do anything about it, because that would be proactive. Instead, I did precisely nothing. And it worked. My sister-in-law recently posted some stunningly gorgeous photos of her daughter (aka The Competition) to Facebook, and when I remarked on them, said she could put me in touch with the photographer and we'd get a 100 euro discount for being recommended. I was still pretending to consider the notion when I realised I'd been daydreaming about what we would all wear for our photoshoot for the past two days (who am I kidding; I've been musing on this, on and off, for maybe a year), and it was really a foregone conclusion. You don't say no when opportunity knocks on your door and offers you a substantial discount on a quality product, do you?

So the one thing, apart from Christmas dinner, that we now have firmly booked for while we're home in Ireland next month, is a professional family photoshoot. I'm thinking we'll go the casual-wear route (for one thing, because that'll be easier to get the kids into, and also because we'll be more comfortable) and all wear jeans with plain tops in solid colours that suit each of us individually and also tone nicely together. Which means (yes, I have been thinking about this; can you tell?) blue and blue for the boys, and either turquoise or maybe lavender for Mabel, and green or rust for me. I might have to go shopping. Perhaps. Just a little.

So tell me, have you ever done professional portraits? What did you wear? Is the everyone-in-jeans-and-bare-feet formula terribly dated or will it age well? I'm haunted by the spectre of B's family portrait from 1977 or so. Not a good era for fashion at the best of times, but his orange-dungaree ensemble has left a lasting scar. This, we wish to avoid.