I don’t have any pearls of motherly wisdom to pass along this Mother’s Day (or Smotherhood Day as I like to call it). Having been a mother for a mere 5 ½ years, I hardly feel qualified to wax philosophic on the subject. But, if someone confined me to a chair, stuck an IV of Capri Sun in my arm and forced me to watch a marathon of Dora the Explorer until I spilled my thoughts, I would probably say something like this:

Ali’s Chickenless Nuggets of Motherly Wisdom

1) If your kid is looking in the mirror with her mouth wide open and proclaims, “Hey Mom, I can see my uterus!”, she probably means her uvula. In the event she actually can see her uterus, you should think long and hard about if that $25 fee for paging the pediatrician after hours is worth it.

2) Unless you cherish the look and feel of plastic covered furniture, NEVER EVER let your kids eat on the couch. I mean it. This is serious. Not even Sandra Day O’Connor would be successful in overruling a binding precedent that establishes the couch as the eminent domain of people who eat yogurt with their hands. Start as you mean to go on.

3) When your kid says, “Mom, will you play with me?”, immediately stop what you’re doing, bend down, look him square in the eyes and say, “I would love to.” Some day soon you’ll never be asked that question again.

4) If you’re at Disneyworld and you’re taking a 45-minute bus ride back to the airport and you have to stop at everyone else’s hotel to pick them up first, but then your sick kid takes an explosive crap in her diaper that smells like a combination of dead opossum and boiled cabbage, make your spouse hold the hazmat formerly known as your kid. Also, apologize profusely to the driver and the other passengers and offer to not set foot in Florida for at least 5 years.

5) Let your kids get dirty. A lot.

6) Turn up the music and dance with your kids. Besides lugging in groceries from the car and schlepping laundry baskets up the stairs, some days it will be the only workout you’ll get.

7) Take a picture of your kid when they’re in that deep sleep just after bedtime. Don’t text it, Facebook it or tweet it. This is the most unburdened they will ever be in their lives – protect that for them.

8 ) You know that sweaty head smell they get after a long nap or an afternoon spent in the sun? Drink it in. Then lock it in an inescapable choke hold in your memory. It will be the only thing that keeps you from throwing them out a window some times.

9) Let your kids see you being as passionate about the other parts of yourself as you are about the Mom part of yourself; the businesswoman, the artist, the physician, the musician, the athlete, the spouse, the woman.

10) Everything you think you won’t do? Oh, you’ll do it; from pacifiers to eating at McDonald’s, from letting them cry it out to grabbing them just a little too forcefully when they’ve got you at your wits’ end. Maybe most of all, motherhood is a daily master class in the art of eating crow, flavored with savory pride and sweet humility.

Happy Mother’s Day. Now go call your mother.

~Ali

I didn’t have time to Google, “how to survive a fall,” but based on what I retained from watching Looney Tunes as a kid, I knew I had to bend my knees and maximize my surface area in a spread eagle position if I ever found my myself in a free fall. It’s impossible for me to peer over the second-floor railing of the mall’s food court without thinking about songs I would like played at my funeral (Tom Petty’s, “Free Fallin’” always pops in my head), so for me to voluntarily climb into a man lift recently and be hoisted 60 feet into the air on a blustery, early spring day is a little bit like asking a vegetarian if she’d prefer a Big Mac or a chicken leg for lunch. Both will make you hurl.

A touch of acrophobia wasn’t going to keep me from having a memorable experience or from achieving my goal: to use a unique vantage point in showcasing the roof and exterior building materials of the newly constructed athletic center of a Division I school, IPFW.

If I avoided experiences because of fear, I would stay curled up in bed with a stack of People magazines and a box of assorted Debrand’s dark chocolate truffles. Trust me, I’ve tried it – as decadent as it sounds, even that gets old, fast.

I should mention I was in the most capable hands I know – my father’s. He asked me to photograph his latest building project for submission to an industry magazine. I’m not an architectural photographer, but as any daughter knows – a girl will do anything for her Dad. And when that girl grows up and has two girls of her own, she’ll do anything to show them they are more powerful than their fears.

After walking the university grounds at IPFW with my dad, not only did I gain an understanding of the scope of my father’s commercial roofing business and the passion he has for giving people jobs, but I discovered this:

The artistry that goes into the design, manufacturing and installation of the seemingly insignificant building materials we pass by every day is not unlike the artistry I employ in a life of weaving stories through photography for my clients. My father’s work and mine share common threads of art and science, though expressed in vastly different mediums. After all these years, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.

If I had said, “Hey Dad, I’ll just shoot from the roof of that parking garage over there”, I would have chickened out on making great images. Worse, I would have missed, from what felt like the top of the world, an opportunity to connect with the only other man (aside from Brian) who will love me for the rest of my life. I was safe with my Dad, I was doing what I love and I lived to write a blog post about it.

The next time one of your fears comes knocking, open the door, grab your camera and run towards it. Just don’t look down.
~Ali

****I am so excited to share this guest post I wrote for my friend and photographer, Jane Ammon’s, blog. You know the gal – she’s the one who’s Naturally Devoted to Childish Delight. She’s wonderfully childish and unabashedly authentic – two qualities I can’t live without. Stop by her blog or Facebook page and see for yourself.

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It’s quittin’ time. Punch your card, pour a glass of wine and spend a leisurely evening reflecting on all the spare time you have after the kids have gone to bed…

After you make the lunches for school tomorrow, respond to the 24 work e-mails that invaded your inbox during the commute home, and fold the pile of laundry that has been giving you the stink-eye since last weekend. Oh, and don’t forget to clean up the kitchen from dinner, pay bills and go to the store to procure 24 cupcakes for the school bake sale tomorrow (at this point, even Martha would accept a helping hand from her nemesis, Betty Crocker). Looks like Cinderella isn’t going to make it to the ball tonight…again.

You don’t need a Paula Deen look-a-like fairy godmother to whip up nonsensical spells at this point. You’re actually pretty good at working magic of your own. Those human-genome-mapping-scientist-type-people haven’t figured it out yet, but there’s a mutation of the multi-tasking gene that occurs during childbirth. You’ve got the parenthood insanity covered.

What you need is renewal. I’m not talking about a 20 minute bubble bath where the kids start banging on the door 8 minutes into it. You need to cook up something that sticks to your ribs…or at least your frayed, multi-tasking nerves. This weekend, try this:

You don’t have to be a photographer to experience the gifts that are inherent in the art. You also don’t have to “cook up” my recipe with the aim of taking of great photographs. You just need to commit to spending time away from your family in the pursuit of something that has no purpose other than to renew yourself.

For me, as a family photographer, that renewal is found in shooting without purpose and I try to do it almost every Saturday morning. Sometimes I go with friends, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes the only time I can squeeze it in is at the crack of dawn. The point is that for two hours, I wander in a world that doesn’t include work, piles of laundry or to-do lists. It usually includes some piece of the world I was too busy to notice during the week.

Cook up a single serving of renewal for yourself this weekend. In doing so, you end up feeding your entire family.

~Ali

Most families hit the beach for Spring Break. Nice, but so cliche. Why spend time showering the sand out of crevices you didn’t even know you had when you can spend it bundled up in a scarf and eating cheese fries in a Midwestern burger chain?

In our covered, horseless carriage, we Andersons made the arduous 10+hour journey to the land-locked, wide-open spaces of my Indiana hometown with little more than an iPad, two Magna Doodles, one car sick canine and a well-stocked arsenal of lollipops and licorice for emergency deployment. The only problem is that while my East Coast city kids aren’t phased by the eau de Potomac after a torrential rain, when they take one shallow breath of the farm-scented Midwestern air, they sputter and gasp like I just let them smoke an unfiltered Marlboro.

If this doesn’t sound like a glamourous Spring Break vacation to you, let me just highlight a few of the reasons you may want to plan your next trip to one of the fly-over States.

While you were applying SPF 5000 every hour on the hour, I was perusing the Steak-N-Shake menu, trying to decide between the cheesy shoestring french fries or the side-by-side milkshake. Aw shucks, it’s the Midwest, so it’s completely socially acceptable to do both.

While you were doing your best impression of a gazelle during your morning jog on the beach, I was sleeping in. When I woke up and the kids were being fed, watered and entertained (for free!) by their grandparents, my biggest decision was whether I felt like leftover green bean casserole or pizza for breakfast. And while the kids were kicking sand into your fancy umbrella drink, I was working on my bicep curls by hoisting one of these $3 beauties up to my face.

Don’t tell the rest of the country you can get $3 beer in Indiana or we’re going to have a real population problem on our hands.

I know it probably seems like I’m bragging about my killer Spring Break plans this year. As great as wearing a scarf and winter coat has been every day this week, I am looking forward to returning to a landscape that doesn’t carry the echo of my voice across miles of farm land when I’m yelling at my dog at 6am to take a dump because I’m freezing my cheese curds off.

I’m also looking forward to returning to the slightly less excessive lifestyle I live on the East Coast. By less excessive, I mean I’ll be eating this for a month as penance for my dietary sins.

I genuinely always pine for my Indiana home, but being from the Midwest is like having an ugly dog: It’s ok for a Midwesterner to poke fun at it, but the minute someone else does, they’re asking for some corn-fed trouble. That being said, I bet y’all are rethinking that beach trip now, huh?

~Ali

Brian Anderson is a fool. And I love him madly for it.

See, there’s a difference between a fool and an idiot. Idiots are straight-up stupid; like the entire cast of The Bachelor franchise or people who obscure their rear car windows with Beanie Babies. I don’t care what Merriam or Webster says about it; in my mind, fools are gold because they play in the world just a little bit differently than the rest of us. If you know Brian Anderson, then you know he’s the biggest fool there is.

If foolishness isn’t cultivated through even the smallest endeavors, it will languish and die on the vine. Though he doesn’t see it this way, Brian has spent the past 40 years cultivating his foolishness in both big and small ways. Just the tip of the iceberg:

When he wanted to learn how to carve wood, he started with a full size carousel horse (Vizir is practically a member of the family…who is completely happy living in the garage, no matter what Brian tells you). Years ago, when a neighborhood association told him he would have to replace all the aluminum wire in his condo with costly copper, he read the entire Missouri electrical code at the library one Saturday afternoon and rewired his house to pass code a few weeks later. As a penniless youth director in his 20’s, he taught himself web design, launched a business and is now a major league geek who no longer wears turtlenecks.

And in what may be his most daring act of foolishness to date, Brian Anderson asked out the girl he was certain would break his heart. Five years later, she married him. Two beautiful daughters later, she loves him more than ever.

Brian is foolish enough to believe he can learn anything from the guitar to the Missouri electrical code; making wine to growing tobacco; underwater robots to brewing tonic. Against all odds, he got me to camp. And not cheap hotel camping either. I’m talking real, pee-outside-and-sleep-in-a-tent-with-creepy-crawly-things kind of camping. For Brian, being foolish is having the good sense to abandon convention when there is greater satisfaction, growth and gain in the adventure of the unknown.

Photo courtesy of Heather O’Quinn

Turning forty years old can be a terrifying milestone for anyone, fool or not. It is a time worthy of both nostalgic reflection and renewed action for future accomplishments. For Brian Anderson, turning forty is an invitation to play harder; to think outside the prevailing expectations of a number.

Lucky for me -  I’m the girl who gets a front row seat for the ride of a lifetime.

Happy 40th Birthday, my foolish love.

~Ali

I’ll never forget the first time I saw her. She was carefully descending the precarious and creaky steps of the tiny Georgetown Dog Shop in a pair of black leather, high-heeled boots that were ridiculously impractical for the occasion. I remember the shoes because when you spend your entire life 14” off the ground, it’s the first thing you notice about a person. It was at this point I said to myself, “Oh please don’t let that high-maintenance-looking one be my human.” And then our eyes met.

With all the finesse of a defensive linebacker in a tailored, red wool coat, she pushed through the crowd of humans that were probably violating fire code in the cramped pet shop and she swooped me up. “Oh hell no,” I woofed under my sweet-smelling puppy breath, but then I looked in her eyes and I knew: Ali Anderson was the one I’d been waiting my entire 15 week life for.

Up to this point, I’d spent my days on the run in South Carolina. I got picked up by the authorities and did some time in the joint where I spent most of the day nervously pacing and pissing myself. You spend your day hoping they don’t call your number because if they do…well, let’s just say I’d be glue right now. Yeah, glue. Not just for horses anymore.

Anyway, one day my number was up. I’m a Lucky Dog though. Maybe it was my devastatingly good looks, but  they put me in a van bound for Washington, D.C. *Cha-ching*. The word on the street was that the Obamas are dog people, so I felt confident Sasha and Malia would make great pack mates. On the ride up though, I discovered it wouldn’t have worked out because I’m a  canine of the liberatarian persuasion (I read a few chapters of Atlas Shrugged in the joint).

So that’s how I found myself face-to-face with Ali and her pack at an adoption event in Georgetown on a freezing cold Sunday in February. Just a few hours later, immediately after I had taken a righteous dump on Ali and Brian’s dining room floor, I knew I’d found my forever home.

Now instead of nervously pissing myself and reading free-market anarchism literature all day, I do stuff like chew sticks.

Work on my hook turns and dribbling skills.

I take naps with Ali and write the occasional guest blog post. Oh, and the rugrats around here have been teaching me to beg for food at the table. Ali shamelessly photographed it one time before she barked at me.

Life is good.

Woof,

Millie Anderson

P.S. If you want to make life good for some of my buddies, check out this website or sniff your way to a local animal shelter.