family traditions. the annual meyers family polaroid.

confession: here in the meyers household, we dont really do any of the things generally associated with the words "family tradition". its not that were trying to be cool or edgy or anything, its just that neither of us grew up in a household with a strong sense of tradition. my parents are very young and just not very sentimental, and jamess family moved a lot and had a constantly changing lifestyle. so the idea of doing things just because thats what our familys always done so thats what were going to do forever is just kind of foreign. 

that being said, there is one arbitrary family tradition that we accidentally stumbled upon. our annual family polaroid, taken by our good friend neal, in front of our front door, every year on july 7th. i say "accidentally" because the first one was taken spontaneously when neal and my sister emily came to visit us in prescott and helped us move into a completely ridiculous giant house that we could not afford (thankfully we only lived there for a few months). here it is:

this picture is actually pretty important because its one of about four pictures of me taken while i was pregnant with alice. i think i was around 25 weeks here? maybe a little more, i dont remember. i do, however remember avoiding being photographed because i didnt want to be reminded about all the time i spent as a puffy, miserable, giant, shiny, emotional whale (although in retrospect, i guess i didnt look nearly as bad as i felt at the time). 

just six months after that picture was taken, we had to pack up and move back to la, and when i was unpacking things to settle into our then-new apartment, i found the previous picture and noticed that july 7th was just a few days away, and that our polaroid camera had one more shot left in it. so we called neal over and took this one:

we had accidentally set the camera on the wrong exposure setting, and when the picture came out all blurry, i was REALLY sad that we didnt have another frame, but now i like it, because, frankly, that year was a total blur (we had a small baby, we moved twice, it took us what felt like FOREVER to get settled into stable jobs), and it really fits. 

that day we decided that neal would come over every year on july 7th to take our picture. since last year we used my last frame of expired polaroid film (that im pretty sure i bought when i was 19), the other day we went to urban outfitters for  a pack of impossible project film (even though its REALLY expensive, it was really important to me that the portraits continued to be polaroids). and heres the result:

 

this year was a lot more stable than last year, so the changes are more subtle. alice is bigger, my hairs longer, james has a better haircut, but were still at the same apartment, with the same jobs, and more or less the same life as last time. well have to see where next year takes us. 

do you have any odd family traditions? id love to hear about them.