Southern Snowball Fight {Lifestyle Photography | Sullivan’s Island, SC}

A few months ago, Charley and I decided that the time was right to put a pool into our backyard.  Our girls love to swim, they’re old enough, and our big, green lawn was just begging for a little something.  After months of saving and planning, we finally broke ground at the end of May.  We had meetings with Josh Atkinson of Atkinson Pools to discuss the plans and how the backyard was essentially going to be off-limits for six to eight weeks due to the perilous conditions of the yard.  No problem, I assured him, we have little girls who have no interest in heavy machinery and playing in piles of dirt.

Fast forward three weeks.  We’ve documented the construction from the safe perch of our porch, never setting foot in the hazardous minefield of our backyard.  We’ve reached the part of the project where it’s finally starting to look like a POOL instead of just a dirt hole.  After dinner one evening, the girls and I decided to check it out a bit closer.  It looked pretty safe since all of the machinery has been hauled away and the deep trenches around the pool had been filled.  It started off as a purely anthropological dig.  The original part of our house was built in the early 1930’s and we started to find some pretty cool stuff that had been unearthed during construction: lots of big shells, an old faucet, a pristine pink tile, an immaculate glass bottle from the turn of the century.  It was really cool!

Since I am the general housekeeper and laundress, I typically eschew anything to do with honest-to-goodness dirt (camping?  no thanks!).  Once it becomes a photo-op, however, there is no limit to the amount of filth the girls can get into.  Some my very favorite images come from spontaneous moments where I grab the camera and just let them be kids (splashing in mud puddles, sidewalk chalk masterpieces, drippy ice cream cone-eating, etc.).  So once we got our feet dirty, the rest just naturally progressed into a full-fledged southern snowball fight (i.e. dirtballs), complete with “dirt angels” at the end!

Did we get utterly filthy?  Yes.  But good, clean fun is entirely overrated 🙂