A year ago I decided to publish a new photograph every week, as an encouragement to get out with camera in hand and take some pictures. My only rule was that everything I published must have been taken in 2009. If I hadn’t decided that, I would have been too lazy and spent most of the year digging through my archives looking for anything interesting that I hadn’t posted before.

Instead, most of what I ended up doing was digging through my growing archive of 2009 looking for something interesting that I hadn’t posted yet. I spent most of the year either relying on a few good outings to provide three, four or even five weeks’ worth of images, or running around on a Sunday evening trying to photograph something, anything, to post for the Monday morning.

I’m quite happy with a few of the images posted over the year, but more than a few are just filler.

Photo A Week 2009 was an experiment with mixed success for me.

(PAW2009 52/52)

It’s been pretty cold ’round our way over Christmas.

(PAW2009 51/52)

I’m not sure whose idea it was to barbecue in December (although, if I had to guess, I would guess my father-in-law), but, even with snow on the ground, the plan went ahead.

(PAW2009 50/52)

(PAW2009 49/52)

It’s that time of year, again.

(PAW2009 47/52)

Cheating a little, this is the one I missed last week.

(PAW2009 48/52)

Yup, I missed 47/52 last week. I’ll make it up.

(PAW2009 46/52)

(PAW2009 45/52)

Yes, I’m very late this week. A shift in working patterns (I’m now freelancing full-time, although still doing some project work for my previous employer, which is nice — I like working there) means the last couple of weeks have been hectic while I get everything bedded in.

This was taken in one of the conference rooms on the top floor of Belfast’s flashy new Fitzwilliam Hotel. The view from up there is also pretty class.

(PAW2009 44/52)

It’s my intention to avoid becoming a daddyblogger. That is, in part, why posting has been so light here for the last, oh, six months: it’s six months today since Reuben was born. (He’s a bit younger in the photo.) Forgive me if I mark the occasion with a momentary relaxation of that policy.

Everyone told me that life wouldn’t be the same. My officemates at work seemed to take great pleasure in telling me all the things I wouldn’t be able to do anymore. They were right, to a point, in that having a baby boy in the house has comprehensively changed the shape and rhythm of life. To tell truth, I’m still figuring out how the routine of work and rest fits around his waking, sleeping, eating and playing. Something tells me I’ll spend the next eighteen or twenty years still figuring that out.

It’s not easy, especially to someone so sensitive to disruption of his sleep, but it is great, and wonderfully fulfilling in a way I find difficult to articulate. Every week he does something new and responds to the world around him in a different way, and every day I learn something new about how to approach that world. We’re blessed with a good-natured and sociable wee boy who, these days, is very quick to grin and laugh. He’s growing into himself as a person, even this early in life, and I’m excited to discover who he becomes.

I was nervous, maybe even reluctant, about becoming a parent. I was very fond of life as it was, and not keen to see it changed too radically. I had the (possibly common, I suppose) worry about how I would feel about the baby; expected to love this person I’d never met, what if I didn’t? I couldn’t see a clear way through the financial consequences of maternity leave and parenthood. All these things and more kept me subdued for months. These days, I’ve discovered — gladly — how completely a child changes your priorities and your outlook. None of those worries is a problem for me now.

Six months down the line, it’s easy and true to say that having Reuben around is the best thing ever.