Oh…You Had to Smile, But Did You Die?

So, we are like many Americans and like to send out Christmas cards with pictures of our family on them. Our picture was taken by my daughter’s 12-year-old best friend and my cell phone. I didn’t want to pay a sitting fee to a photographer, to then review them and feel like I could have done just as good…so, I got the next best thing, Grace!

My “family” is a little different than the traditional family, but it is what it is. Our family is compiled of me and my kids, plus my boyfriend and his kids. That’s two adults, five kids and a dog to try and get to smile at the same time = IMPOSSIBLE! Between picking our outfits and finding a date we were all together, I was exhausted…

Picking out our outfits was a challenge, as I didn’t want to go out and buy everyone a whole new outfit. My favorite Christmas color is red, so I picked a few colors we around had that went with red. Red and gray went together pretty good I thought, so I threw in a few other colors and called it done!

Now that I had a vision of our outfits, where the heck were we going to take these pictures? The park? That sounds great! I was worried about weather; is it going to be too sunny or too rainy? How were we going to take this picture without all of the fall leaves in it? Sitting or standing? Again, this makes me exhausted. I picked a place that I knew I could crop all of the fall leaves out of the picture, a way for us to sit.

Once I got off work on Wednesday before Thanksgiving (thankfully my boss let me cut out a little early), I rushed home and we all changed clothes, fixed hair and tried not to kill each other.

Off to the park we went, Photographer Grace in tow. At this point, I had seconds to locate a spot for the pictures that met the above listed requirements and get everyone in their spots. One of the boys wanted to play on the equipment, another didn’t want his picture taken and my daughter Alyssa was wrestling with the dog to keep her off the muddy grass.

Ready, Set, Go! I got Kyle and his daughter in place, then the two older kids and finally, the boys…here we go, we were ready for our pictures. Down I went and with a smile on my face, I asked everyone to “pretend to be happy”…let’s just get these pictures over with…I said “SMILE” through my gritted teeth. I wanted these pictures to look as good as our summer family pictures had. I want that perfect image I had in my head…well, it is what it is…

As you can see, not everyone smiled, some actually came to tears, but we all lived through it! The most important thing is that we captured this point in time. So, I deem our 2015 Christmas Card Picture a success, I mean really…we are all in the picture and no one died!