Christmas Card 2010

I love receiving Christmas cards in the mail.  LOVE! The cute pictures of the families I love, the nice messages, the wishing Merry Christmas, getting snail mail, I love it all! I figure if I want to keep receiving these cute holiday cards I better keep sending them, despite being able to keep in touch with people easily with facebook. We haven't taken a decent family picture since June and the opportunity for one isn't in our near future. But that's ok, I have adorable girls and they are all people really care to see anyway. So I deemed today picture/Christmas card day. 

Have you ever tried to take a successful "they are both smiling and looking at the camera" picture of two toddlers? It's not exactly the type of experience people crave. Mostly because it's insanely frustrating. Oh and impossible and should only be done by professionals who are being paid lots of money to do so (note to Kirk; please leave my paycheck under my pillow tonight). I took about 700 pictures today. I will share some of them with you, because I want you to appreciate the effort put into dang Christmas cards (who even likes those things anyway? Aren't we supposed to photo shop smiles and just blog the "e-card"?). 

But really here are some of our attempts:

 

 

 

Then I let my frustration out in one really loud scream (and if you know me you know it was LOUD). Which was probably too loud because it made Audrey cry, but both girls sat and posed for pictures afterward. Unfortunately screaming Audrey does not prove to be Christmas card worthy.

 

So we took a break. Audrey got her juice from her favorite possession...that dang red sippy cup (honestly I don't know the last time it actually was washed in the dishwasher, parting for an hour is unbearable). The girls both had a dumb dumb sucker and we had a dance party (seriously my house is never this dirty I just wanted to make a mess for the picture).

Which finally resulted in everyone going outside, sitting on the front step, me only having to hit myself in the head once for decent smiles, and a cute picture on the first retry. Please enjoy this picture. We all contributed a few tears to make it happen.