Christmas Card Contenders

Oh, the time honored tradition of the family Christmas picture - quite an undertaking in our household. For a task that should take no longer than 2 minutes, it turns into a 20 minute ordeal which deteriorates into complete mayhem by the end. What you don't see behind the scenes is Aaron acting like Bozo the Clown trying to coax a smile (and for a logical minded engineer like Aaron, this is quite a stretch). In the first group of photos, the kids had just had their faces painted from a trip to Santa. To conceal this, I tried to have them press their cheeks together - you can see hints of the snowman on Jordan and Christmas tree on Kylie in the other photos. Those were Christmas card contenders until Grandma came for a visit with adorable Christmas outfits. It was then that she got to witness firsthand, the painstaking task of the family photo. She bravely tried to get all 5 of us together, but this proved to be impossible, with kids going limp from exhaustion, and Mom and Dad getting smile fatigue. Perhaps one year, there will be an entire family photo, but until then, I have to get much better at my photoshop skills.