Week 7: Taboo

Once again, I have to credit my husband (and Shel Silverstein) for this one. When I initially read the topic for this week, my mind went to 31 different places, all of them highly inappropriate. And, yeah, the subject was Taboo but there are places a pastor's wife just isn't going to go on her Facebook page or her blog. Trying to come up with an appropriate taboo was proving to be a challenge for me.

Troy wrote down the words to the Silverstein poem "Hat" on a napkin yesterday morning and I ran with it.

HAT

Teddy said it was a hat,

So I put it on.

Now Dad is saying,

"Where the heck's

The toilet plunger gone?"

-Shel Silverstein

Here's what I used:

To capture the shot, I first had to locate the plungers in Walmart because, let's be honest, there wasn't any way in the world that I was going to let my sweet babies put our eight-year-old plunger on their faces. I thought I'd find them in the bath aisle but I was wrong. Apparently, toilet plungers are in the home improvement section. This makes sense if you don't live with two little boys who make use of the plunger so frequently that it's a prominent feature of your bathroom. But for us, it's practically part of our tour when we have guests. "Here's the kitchen. The boys' room. The playroom. The plunger."

My sons simply could not have had more fun with this photo shoot. It took me a minute to get them to stop sword fighting with the plungers.

Once that was accomplished, they really settled into the shoot. Faces. Heads. Torsos. They were absolutely not particular.

I like to imagine that whoever was in charge of monitoring the security cameras was dumbfounded by this situation. "Sir," he'd say to his manager, "we have a situation in home improvement. Some lady is encouraging her kids to play with plungers."

With all the merchandise cluttering up my shots, I decided that I'd need to really get into my role as a serious photographer. So, I did what any serious photographer would do. I climbed into the back of the cart. Suddenly, there was a full fledged adult balancing in the back of a basket on wheels, forcing her sons to play with plungers. And, because the scene wasn't crazy enough, I then told my children to lay down on the floor. In Walmart.

They didn't really seem to mind. And they thought it was utterly hysterical that mommy was standing in the back of the cart trying not to die.

If they form a band together when they grow up, I'm totally making them name it Plunger Heads. And I'm going to force them to use that as their album cover.