In keeping with self inflicted theme of the season, procrastination, we attempted our Christmas card photo last night. Note the word attempted. A few weeks ago, actually on Thanksgiving day, we took our extended family photo with my parents and siblings. We used a regular film camera, on a tripod, with a timer, and there were sixteen people involved. My mom just got the pictures back and every single one of them turned out perfect. My children smiled like angels.
Now fast forward to last night, only eight people, a photographer (my mom) and a digital camera. PURE CHAOS. It was the kind of situation where you are grinning ear to ear but secretly pinching kids and hissing into their little ears "you better knock it off and smile or there will be NO dessert for you." I know, it doesn't sound like a very heavy threat but in this house, that's huge. I might as well have said that I would cut off one of their limbs. But no, they didn't all smile nice, at least not all at once. There were also lighting issues and some flash induced red-eyes that made me look like a raging psycho crazy woman, which isn't that far from the truth. I tried to do a little tweaking and editing but alas, I don't have photo shop and paint just wasn't cutting the mustard. I see retakes in our very near future, hopefully before Christmas.
The photo shoot was an appropriate way to end the day. It was as though my children were little vampire bats fluttering around me and slowing sucking away my life. Morbid? Maybe. Some highlights were the cheetos incident, the perfectly staggered naps so that no more than one child was ever asleep at once, the glimmer in a four year old's eye that said, "I'm looking for trouble today", and a little girl's meltdown over an assault on her very-most-specialist porcelain doll. I felt as though I was being tested and I'm pretty sure that I failed miserably. Don't you just love coming here and listening to me whine??! Happy thoughts Heth, happy thoughts. The one thing that went really really well was bedtime. I sent them all to bed a little bit early.....ok, an hour early, and they were out within five minutes. I snuggled up on the couch with a cup of cocoa and a Spongebob fleece blanket and gazed at the now ever so green Christmas tree. (a little food coloring in the water works miracles) It was so quiet, and so peaceful. Sigh. Today started off a whole lot better, besides how can a day go wrong when it begins with a plate full of pancakes?
5 comments:
I completely hear you! I thought it would be easy to take pictures as they made Christmas cookies this year, but Tiffany's head looks like it's going to fall off in most of them! Then we tried family pictures at the new arcade in the mall - there is one that turned out okay, but Tiff is still a little crooked - oh, and Olivia isn't looking at the camera - oh, and Darin doesn't have his eyes open.
That part about "no dessert" was cracking me up - here we all "smile" for pictures, but really are more interested that all the kids are smiling and looking at the camera at the same time. How hard could that be? We thought about taking a goofy picture this year (there's still time, right?) instead. The children at their best - trained goofy professionals.
LOL-ing here.
Does green food coloring really work? Really? I have the feeling I am being terribly gullible (sp?).
Mopsy- Green food coloring really does work. The tree was painfully brown/red when we brought it home and it really truely IS green now. When we first brought it home and put it in the tree stand with lots of water, we also added a whole bottle of green and a little bit of blue too. Just keep the kids/dog away from the water.....
Heth, if you need help editing your digitial family photo .... think about emailing me in WDM.
:-)
Wonders can been done with PhotoShop.
I told the kids that I would take 10 pictures and them pick one. So needless to say, the picture is not that great but, oh well! To get all 7 of us looking good, we would have to take at least 100, I think!
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