What do you get when you have a wonderful couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, their two beautiful grown up daughters with spouses and 5 grandkids ranging from not even two to eight years old?  You get lots of running and laughing and tickling and jumping and butterfly searching and hugging and kissing – in other words you get loud messy loving happy CHAOS!  And I absolutely LOVE it!  This family reminds me so my of my own – I also have a sister and between two of us we have five kids.  And whenever we get together at our parents house it is just as loud and loving as it these guys were!

This session was a 50th anniversary gift for my the Grandparents and I honestly think (other than an awesome trip somewhere exotic) this is the best anniversary gift I can think of.  I think I may need to arrange a big family photo session for my own parents 50th anniversary!  And I hope that I will be so lucky to get to celebrate my own 50th anniversary and that my own kids will arrange an awesome photographer to come and take pictures of all of us:)

But back to this session… We did this photoshoot at the family’s home in Allendale, Bergen County – this is the house where both sisters grew up and I think it was so special doing their session there.  The Grandma (who looks amazing by the way!) said that she wanted posed portrait of all five grandkids together and normally it would not be an issue but three of these kids just travelled all the way from Maryland and the other two – from New York City.  They were all rallied up and excited to see each other and having them stand perfectly still and posed was somewhat of a challenge.  The daughters were somewhat skeptical about getting posed pictures of all the grandkids but being a professional that I am, we were able to do that.  But their favorite picture with the grandchildren was this one – to me it embodies chaos that is life with small children and when this Grandma saw it she said that it was just perfect because it captured exactly what their family was!:)  And to me, always striving to capture authentic images, there is no higher compliment!