Thank God for kids. I used to spend a lot of time trying to find the 'right' Christmas card to send to friends and family. Since having kids, you put 'em in something festive, plop 'em down in front of a tree, large wrapped gift, or anything else holiday-ish and Viola! Instant Christmas Card. That is, until we had two kids. S started crawling in October, so plopping her down in front of the Christmas tree sounds good in theory, but then she sees the lights, ornaments, gifts, tree skirt, piece of dirt/trash/lint the size of an atom and that becomes her sole temporary reason for existence. Divert her from this task, and boy - you'd better have earplugs handy or have level 3 hearing impairment.
So, over the course of two weeks we tried different things. I lost count of how many pictures I deleted. I was ready to admit defeat and just make do with what we had when we realized she was at that perfect stage of tired. You know, the one where she is too tired to scoot around, but not so tired that every little thing sends her into wails of displeasure. T, now three, is mostly a good sport about it. Our problem with T was that he wanted to kiss S. Now at first we thought, "what a great picture that will be!". Alas, T, like my husband and I, has a huge head and no matter what we tried, it blocks the sun...err..S's face.
At any rate, we got a couple good ones and now have to decide which one to use. The photo gods were smiling Sunday, that's for sure! I think the plan for next year should be to start trying to take the Christmas picture in September and use the Santa hats we bought this year (because for about 30 seconds we foolishly thought we could set the timer and actually take a family picture - HAHAHAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaa) to prove that it's supposed to be a Christmas picture. In Germany, we've had incredible autumns since we've been here and that would be a great picture - if we can manage it - of the kids in Santa hats, outside, with all the fall colors around them. Don't hold your breath though.
