Christmas Cards

This year I decided I wanted to have nice pictures taken of the kids, to make Christmas cards with their picture on them. My father-in-law is really into photography and takes really nice pictures so I asked him if he could take some shots of the kids for me; He agreed. So I made plans with my mom to go get outfits at Baby Gap for the pictures. Saturday morning comes around and I am planning on taking Mila with me to the mall. I always take the baby, she’s the easy one. On this particular morning, James is being really good. When I start getting ready to go he asked me where I was going, so I told him I was going shopping. He asked if he could go with me. My first reaction was to immediately say no, but then the guilt started setting in. I felt bad, and he was being really good so I decided to take him instead of Mila. I mean, I figured it would be a quick trip. I had already picked out what I wanted to get online so I just had to find it in the store and buy it. Boy, was I wrong.

I won’t go into too much detail about every single melt-down we encountered that day. But, let me just say that a quick 1 hour trip to the mall turned out to be the most stressful 3 hours of my life. At the 3 hour mark I called Dan, and he came and rescued me. We switched kids, A screaming 2 year old for a peaceful 4 month old. At this point I was able to finish my shopping, and get the outfits we needed.

Sunday was picture day. I thought this day through. I went and got some bribes for James. We were equip with Sour gummy worms, and sweettarts. I figured, what kid wouldn’t sit still for one decent picture for some candy? Well, That would be my child. I got them all dressed up, looking so awesome in their Christmas outfits. Every time I turned around James was ripping his tie off. After about 30 minutes, of begging and pleading with James to behave, and smile, and sit up straight, and hold his baby sister so she wouldn’t fall over, we gave up. We got a ton of pictures, so now we have our fingers crossed that just one of them turned out nice enough to make a card of.

Life lesson learned: I cannot expect things to actually go as planned when I am working with a small child.

I will post the pictures we got as soon as they are emailed to me, but as for now this one seems to fit.