Christmas Card Pictures

It's that time of year again...time for me to stress out over Christmas cards. For some reason, I get nervous about everything from the picture to the date we mail them out.  I decided to kill two birds with the one proverbial stone this year and combine our Thanksgiving vacation with a family photo shoot with a photographer.  My hope was that we would take a half hour out of our vacation, snap that perfect Christmas card picture of the girls, get a bonus family portrait, and be back to having fun within the hour.  As all of you who have children already know, this was a ridiculous goal.  First of all, a half hour?  Puh-lease.  Getting our entire family dressed and ready for the photos took at least 2 hours, and I'm being conservative on that estimate.  Then the challenge of getting a three year old and a one year old to cooperate for a thirty minute photo shoot presented itself, and we failed.  Miserably.  Cille did not want to be anywhere near Stella, or do anything that we wanted her to do, basically.  So, at the end of the day our favorite picture ended up being this one...

Now, a picture of Cille offering Stella a noonie is cute, but not exactly what I had in mind for our Christmas cards this year, so it was back to the drawing board for the cards.  Oh, and now we're in a time crunch!!!  And my stress level rose...

We decided to try a do-over this past Saturday afternoon in New Orleans with me as the photographer.  Daddy, Mawmaw, and Pawpaw came along to child wrangle.  The fact that I stayed up all night with Tripp on Friday night did not help my patience, either.  We tried out two locations.  The first was Notre Dame Seminary, which has some nice buildings and a beautiful nativity scene.  Cars kept stopping and asking us if we were about to do a performance.  We told them maybe next time.  Here's what we ended up with...

I didn't achieve that perfect shot at the seminary, so we moved on to City Park for another try.  Look!  A gondola!

Stella chose this pose...

All that smiling can really wear a girl out...

This shot pretty much sums up Cille's attitude for the entire session...

Pouty mouth...

Eventually, we felt like we had done all we could and just let the girls play...

Daddy showed Cille the ducks...

Cille showed us some grass...

Stella slipped into something a little more comfortable and went tree climbing...

So which photo did we actually use for the Christmas cards?  You'll have to wait and see!