Family Pictures

Friday, November 23

We have been talking the last couple of months about getting our family pictures taken again.  I think it has been about a year and a half since our last ones.  With all of our crazy schedules I decided that Thanksgiving weekend might be a good time to get them done since everyone would be home from school and work.  I talked with my husband about it and then called the portrait studio to see what times they had available for the day after Thanksgiving.  The person I talked to at the studio suggested that it might be best if we come in for the first appointment of the day - 9:00 a.m.  I thought that might be a little early for us to get everyone ready - especially with so many girls - but in the end decided to set our appointment for that time.  The funny thing is that it wasn't until several days afterwards that I realized that I had set that appointment for Black Friday.

After I made the appointment I set about finding coordinating colors/clothes for all of us to wear - and amazingly I didn't have to buy any clothes at all.  Then the morning of we got everyone up and fed and dressed and made it to our appointment on time.  Unfortunately MJ was not in a very good mood...  We had an excellent photographer who did a good job keeping the kids' attention and getting them to smile, but when we tried getting some pictures of just the kids, MJ didn't want anything to do with it.  We ended up getting several good family pictures - mostly because I was holding MJ in my arms the whole time (and tickling her to get her to smile).  The rest of the kids did great and cooperated very well.  The only other problem was Luke's glasses.  There were a couple of cute shots of the kids that we did manage to get but Luke's head wasn't turned quite right and the flash reflected right off of his glasses and did not look good at all.

And even though the experience was quite tiring for all of us - especially us parents - we ended up with a really cute picture for our wall!  And we got a smaller funny one of the kids with MJ screaming while M&M is trying to hold her on her lap and the photographer had the rest of the kids do sad/pouty faces.  It turned out pretty funny - even Kay has a great sad face!