Five, Ella.

A grin of tiny pearly teeth and a glint of pure, wild mischief flash from behind her overgrown golden fringe and she leaps straight at me. From the ground she is in my arms in the time it takes me to open my mouth, my 'what are you doing?' never getting it's chance to taste air. Her legs snap around my waist like magnets and with her arms waving in the air like a hippy at Glastonbury she is in my arms, my spider monkey - as light and as easy as her namesake. 

If her sister did that to me (and she's tried) she would knock me to the ground, give me a black eye and put my back out for a week. Ella is only a kilo lighter, has only ever been at most, a kilo lighter and yet she carries herself with such ease, flying just above the surface of the waves, that she feels little heavier now than she ever has. In my lap she settles in, curled like a cat and no more obtrusive. Sometimes an arm or leg goes awry and I get punched in the face but it's not clumsiness, more a case of limbs too long to control, jumps a little too ambitious to pull off, momentary forgetfulness that she can not in fact fly and I am not in fact an immovable object.

'You're not a snuggler like your sister' people tell her, but they've got it wrong, she is, she just takes her time to suss out who to trust, her need for an audience is minimal to non-existent in comparison to her twin's.
When I lie on my side to watch telly, with my knees bent up towards my hips – the only way I can fit onto our little two person sofa – she climbs into the triangular gap between my legs and the back cushions, resting her head on my bum and tucking her knees up to her chest. We fit together perfectly, one large and one little piece of a jigsaw, a jigsaw that builds the picture that is our family. The dog tries to climb in too, she doesn't fit but somehow Ella squeezes her in, wrapping her arms around her neck and loving her fiercely. 

Running off ahead on a still and perfectly crisp winter morning, the sun backlights her and with all of her height she looks both tiny, too small to be allowed out of my reach, and like that's it, she's off, see you later. Today she needs space, tomorrow perhaps she won't let you out of her sight. My independent, curious, ephemeral wanderer. 

Not that she isn't also batshit crazy at times, point a camera at her and her eyes will cross, her tongue will stick out at a wonky angle and an inhuman noise will emanate from her contorted face - it's not cool, whatever she might think. When the music comes on she dances like a wild thing, spinning moves from a break-dancing video we watched once, eighteen months ago. Her memory is a steel trap - when we need reminded where we were when that thing happened, when need the dog's lead un-lost or the way out of the woods pointed we ask Ella, she knows where shit is. Of course sometimes she gets confused, she is only five, although it's easy to forget - she was born older, with a look in her eye and a quiet fire burning steadily in her soul. 

I can't help but wonder what age she will reach when the world feels more comfortable to her, what age it is that her heart was born. Will she have to wait until she's thirty like I did, for her life to catch up with her soul? We can only wait and see and that - watching this spider monkey grow into and then beyond her world - is a prospect that thrills me.

Five, Ammie.

She pins me down, a weight that still takes me by surprise. Five, how did she become five? How did they become five? They have ten years between them, nobody counts parenting in accumulative terms but they should - I have parented ten years of childhood and yet I'm no less clueless than when I started.

Curled into a ball in my lap she radiates into me, she is my hot water bottle, my lap dog, my ballast. She is both boulder and kitten - skull crashing against my cheekbone, elbows jabbing hard into my tits, silken golden strands tickling my face and silvery down catching the light from the setting sun. Just as I find a way to balance her weight so that the nerve that's been trapped in my hip for weeks doesn't thrum at too high a frequency, she shifts. From curled like a sleeping puppy she stretches, legs sliding forth and draping one either side of mine, t-shirt riding up and exposing a belly as soft and warm as risen dough, head lolling like a bowling ball against my chest. It will be a maximum of three minutes before she rearranges herself again; wriggling, squirming, shifting, constant flux and motion, a lava lamp of a child.

Which is as it has always been, she started kicking the shit out of me as soon as she was big enough to kick. Implanted higher she punched and kicked and rolled against my stomach, then my ribs and finally my lungs. Her sister - desperate for her own space - turned away from her at the first chance she got, nuzzled her head into my pelvis and stayed still and quiet, weathering the punches and biding her time. Once born we had to tie her up to get her to sleep (they call it swaddling but it is what it is), arms and legs bound to tiny body to stop them from thrashing the whole night long. It was with bitter reluctance that we stopped wrapping her, many months later than recommended. The desire to bind her tightly in fabric so that she would just stay still lurked in the guilty corners of my brain until . . . well sometimes it still creeps over me.

She doesn't let me hold her much any more. She is five, she is busy and she needs to be sick before she crawls into my lap, sweating and sniffing and sighing and clutching that same ugly little rabbit she has been carrying around for years. Little Bunny has become more vocal of late; before we left London he was pretty quiet, living mainly in her bed, going unmentioned from morning until night, but since we started dragging our children hither and yon he has had quite a lot to say - for a stuffed animal. His birthdays come twice weekly, he learned French and then Gaelic but decided that he'd rather speak Nonsense. His tastes in food blossomed and shrunk, as contrary as well, a five year old. 'It wasn't me, it was Little Bun' has become the most common explanation for something becoming mysteriously broken or lost, or for when Quiet Time has become distinctly un-quiet.

She has five year of life under her belt, she is learning to read and write and live in this world without her parents there at every step, and yet when her hair (recently hacked off at school in a fit of annoyance) is swept back from her face, her eyes closed and lashes resting on rounded cheeks, she is the same boulder-headed baby she was five years ago, exactly the same, and seeing how little she has changed since she was just brand new to this world my heart aches and grows and throbs. She is my baby, my girl, that tiny scrap who kicked and fought so hard, from conception right the damn way through. May that never change. 

Spring! And a name change.

It's spring! In the south east, I imagine that in Scotland it's still eternal winter. But down here, spring! 

And do you know what spring means? Spring means time to put your pretty dress on, take your shoes off, blow some bubbles and splash in a public fountain. Oh, and hire me to photograph it. 

That's right folks, it's family photography season again! 

The old business is no more: apparently there is a wedding photography company somewhere on the other side of the world with a similar name to the old B&B, and they weren't willing to share. So, we are now Bluebird and the Bear, which is good too. 

Prices are £300 for a two hour session, which typically results in 50-100 high-res images. 

Call me! 

(peonies@btinternet.com) 

Bird and Bear {London family photography}

It's been a little while since I mentioned Bird & Bear, in truth because I've been too absorbed with settling in to London to think much about it, but over the last couple of weeks I've been really feeling the gap in my life that is filled by spending time photographing families in all of their natural, imperfect and beautiful glory (nobody puts baby in a basket) and longing to fill my days with family photoshoots again. 

I'm still offering what I think is a pretty nice deal, £200 for two hours of photography with you and your kids (or just your kids, if you don't fancy having your picture taken!) and high-res digital files of 30-50 images sent to you a couple of weeks later. This deal will run to the beginning of August, at which point I'm going to be switching to a more traditional model of charging for time and prints separately. So, if you are interested in some pictures capturing your kids as they are right now, before the little beasts go and change AGAIN (because they keep doing that, and it's really annoying) get in touch and we will set something up. 

I'm based in South London now (in case you didn't know) and will travel throughout London for no additional travel costs. I'm always more than happy to travel further afield though and would love to hear from you if you live outside London too. 

I'm also working on putting together a photobook option, where I design and print a beautifully bound book with the photos from your session. I wasn't sure that anyone would want this because they're not exactly cheap (well, there are cheap options but they look... cheap.) but Nye and I got a book of our photos from W&P's first year printed at Christmas and ohmygod, it's the loveliest thing. A book, an actual book, to sit down with on the sofa with a glass of wine and get completely lost in. It's not quite the same as flicking through thumbnails on your phone. In fact it's a whole other thing, having a tangible object, that if you don't spill your wine on it, will still be in your bookcase to show your kids when they grow up and then their kids when they grow up. I remember a time when that didn't seem magical, when that was just what you did with photos, but now in the iphone era a book full of pictures of your loved ones seems like a truly precious thing. 

There's more info on www.birdandbear.co.uk and you can contact me at peonies@btinternet.com

A Second birthday

We forgot until we were half way through making breakfast, when we turned to each other: 'they're two! You're two!' 
Celebratory toast and jam and then frantic packing and cleaning to get to the ferry on time after a long holiday on a windy isle. 
Ferry fish and chips for lunch, plans to stop in Skye for some birthday cake derailed by two two year olds, fast asleep in the back of the car. 
A long drive home, through mountains and moors and forests. Pizza for dinner, a low-nutrient day. 
A bath and bed and asleep before the lights are out. Us and them.

Two. Two two year olds. Two. 

A Saturday in October.