Taking the Christmas Pictures

It's that time of year again.

Christmas Card picture time, that is.

This year I went against tradition and took the hubby with us.



And guess what? I'm taking him with every year. For reals. Not only did he help arrange the kiddos, found awesome places to take the pics, and smoothed their hair away from their faces (yes, I am talking about Orrin),



But he also made them smile/laugh for the pics (which isn't easy to do when there is snow on the ground and Mom makes you take off your coats for pictures).

I will leave it up to your imagination to figure out what he did to elicit these expressions...



I ended up with a lot of cutesy pics. Unfortunately, there were a lot of oopsies in said pics too.

Like this one. Adi's poor hand placement (trying to keep her hand from freezing, I assume) and Piper's moving foot.



And this one. Once again, Adi's hand (probably should have just let them wear gloves), and Porter deciding to scratch his face just at this moment.



And then I tried to get individual photos of the kiddos. Porter just wouldn't hold still long enough! Or make a decent face...



Luckily, Adi decided to stick her hands in her pockets in this one.



Isn't this one so Piperish?



This pic almost won Card Honors, but I thought the background was a bit distracting. OP disagrees with me and he voted for this one.

But I have total veto power, so I chose another one.



Pshhh, like I'm going to show you right now! You'll see in about a month when you get the card in the mail. Or when I post it on my blog.

I, after all, cannot guarantee 100% that these will get out this year. Seeing as how I'm kind of a ticking time bomb right now, trying to keep this baby in until after Christmas. And trying to move while I'm knocking on 8 months of pregnancy. Yikes!

Hopefully I'll succeed.

After we took pics, we had a quick (and I mean quick) lunch up there in the oh-so-beautiful Milcreek Canyon.




If you look closely at the white sign in the middle, you can read that it says "Closed for the Season". This caused Adi a lot of worry during our hurried meal.



All and all, this ended up being our most fun picture-taking event yet.

Looks like OP is coming with every year!