Christmas Pictures

I have pretty much come to the conclusion that family pictures will always be a debacle. Is it even possible to get everyone looking at the camera and smiling when you have two toddlers?

A couple weekends ago we headed out to New Smyrna Beach with Andrea to get some Christmas pictures. I'm so lucky to have such a great photographer as one of my good friends! She spent most of the day with us and got some great pictures of our crazy day! Thanks again Andrea!

First let me back up and start the debacle story with our wardrobe. I wanted us to all wear white shirts and Santa hats. The only shirts I could find for all four of us were those waffle-like thermal shirts. OK, fine, so I buy them for all of us. When Brian and I tried ours on, they looked like undershirts. So back to the mall we went. We ended up finding green and red shirts. Great. We went to Target and found adult Santa hats and one child Santa hat. We bought those with the intention of going to another Target and buying another child sized hat. Five Targets later and we still didn't have a hat. Scratch that idea, we won't wear the hats.

So we drove over an hour to the beach in our green and red shirts. When we got there and opened the car door, it felt like a hurricane was blowing through! The wind was crazy! You can tell in these first few pictures how bad it was.

Rylie didn't care, though. She was having a great time! She was running around giggling and saying "Beach time! Beach time!"

I went back to the truck to get Rylie's hat and Christmas flower to at least keep her hair out of her face, and grabbed the Santa hats too. So what if Rylie didn't have the same hat? I wanted my hair out of my face too. By the time I came back, the bottom of her pants were wet and she was covered in sand. Stinker! I put her hat on her, and for whatever reason, I put it behind her ears instead of over them. I just don't like the way it ended up looking. Good thing she is cute.

Have you noticed that there are no pictures of Bryce in the sand? Yeah, he was having NO part of that! (This was his first time at the beach, BTW.) If we tried to set him down, he started crying like we were hurting him. Poor baby.

When we had stopped at the final Target, I bought some big Christmas lollipops. I thought if I gave one to Bryce it might distract him from the sand. It actually worked for like a minute.

Yay! Bryce is OK with the sand! Hurry, get Rylie and we can get a cute picture of them together!

Real cute, right? HA! Like I said, the distraction only worked for a minute. As soon as he realized where he was sitting, he wasn't happy again.

We decided it was time to pack it up, so we walked back up to the hotel where we parked. They had some chairs out by the pool so we let the kids sit and enjoy their lollipops for a few minutes.

So here it is...the Christmas card! Unless our friends read the blog, they won't really get why I laugh every time I look at it. But you know what? It was a fun day (well, maybe not so much for Bryce) and I'm sure we will always remember it.

(The card looks a little blurry here, but I guess that is just because I snagged our proof off the website.)

I have a feeling the Santa pictures will go just about as well. Especially since I'm sure Bryce will be scared to death of him.

Merry Christmas everyone!