Where is Annika?

A friend actually had a look at my blog yesterday (surely a first!) and remarked that there were no recent pictures of Annika. I have now added a couple, but it is a bit difficult to find them. Right now, Christopher seems to be the most interesting - and willing - subject. Invite him to pose for a picture and he does it willingly, then runs to the camera, "Me see! Me see!" to see the result. Also, he is the one who wears 3-D glasses upside down and poses in his underwear to show the picture he has colored - completely - all by himself.

Benjamin, if requested, runs away from a photo opportunity, or puts on such a silly face (see the header above) that it is hard to capture his true essence. He got a great new skiing outfit this morning and put it on for the first time (his old one was disentegrating rapidly). He looked so cool and sophisticated, yet he wouldn't allow a single picture.

Annika, on the other hand, is generally obliging. However, her pictures seem to lack the 4-year-old silliness of Christopher's. When she was 4 - and younger - her silliness was preserved on paper, not digitally. (OK, there are exceptions!)

In fact, we have tons and tons of photos of our beautiful firstborn - I only recently realized how many photos we had when I tried to do a 10-year anniversary album for David last month (yes, it has really been that long). The idea was fairly simple - one family photo for each year, and 10 smaller photos of significant events. Of course I had to scan in the first five years to make it happen, but it was worth it - even just going through the old photos, in their dusty boxes from the top shelf of the closet, was like a trip to the past. I have scrapbooked a lot of the first 5 years, but you get used to seeing the same photos that made "the cut" and got in the albums. It was fun to see all the others as well. So what did I notice?

• 1998 was a lean year for pictures. Aside from the standard wedding photos, we hardly touched the camera on our honeymoon. We have - sum total - ten pictures, one of a hotel room, and various shots of one or the other of us, but almost none of us together. Even our "round-the-world" trip that October didn't generate much more. Fortunately, we had a series of posed shots from a professional photographer in Moscow that we used for our future first Christmas card. Otherwise, we might have had blank spaces!
• 1999 was all about Annika, and 2000 as well. Annika in one outfit, Annika in another, Annika eating, Annika smiling, Annika not smiling, Annika crawling - well, you get the picture(s).
• By 2001 and 2002, Benjamin gave her a bit of competition, the "Stora Syster - Lille Bror" theme took over.
• But by 2003, poor Christopher's birth announcement hardly ranked in the top 10.
• The rest of the years flow along, except 2006. Daddy passed away in July, and the year just lacked a lot of photo ops.

For the actutal stats in our anniversary album - single head shots, with nobody else in the picture, we have Annika leading with 22, Benjamin with 12 and Christopher with 11. So as for the blog, sorry honey, but you had it coming!

Don't know if the link will work, but the album can be found at:

Anniversary Album