Oh the Christmas Card Picture!

Every year we've been married I've made Eric take Christmas pictures with me.  Pre-kids this meant self timer pictures in front of the Christmas tree we put up on Thanksgiving.

Even if the camera wasn't straight and my husband was making a funny face...

 Or the dog wasn't really in the mood to take pictures

This one is my favorite, still.

And this marked the end to the self timer-in-front-of-the-tree picture for us, for the time being anyway, because as you can tell (or may remember) I was pregnant with Kayla at the time.

Since taking pictures with kids is hard enough we weren't about to try to do the self timer thing again... plus we wanted something slightly more professional.  So, we went to Picture People and came  home with a nice, albeit generic, Christmas picture.

We've been going to Picture People every month Kayla's first year and now every month of Tyler's first year.... along with Christmases and any time family is in town.  We go a lot!  So, you'd think Kayla would be used to this by now.  Maybe she is, maybe that's why when we went to take this years picture she was incredibly hyper, running around the store, playing with all the props, leaving the photography "room", etc.  No matter what we tried to do - entertain her, scold her, reason with her... none of it worked.  Until I finally said "fine, you go sit over there and we'll take pictures without you."  She sat for a minute, and then decided she could be in the pictures with us instead of running around.  But only by mommy.  That lasted for about 2 minutes then she was running around again.  She took another picture or two then decided she was in trouble again and put herself in timeout.  That's when we pretended to be having a ton of fun taking pictures and got this little gem of a picture. 

I know, a lot like his 4 month pic, but notice the addition of happy dad in the picture.  :-) 

Sure enough she came back a few minutes later and we convinced her to take one more picture. 

It was hard to get her to "hand me an ornament" while not actually handing it to me (and thus tearing down the tree) and look at the camera at the same time.  Fun stuff!

We didn't get the best pictures because she was so uninterested, and their props and backgrounds aren't all that exciting, but we got a few.  I think we're going to have to try the on-location photographer next time because then we can run around and have fun rather than try to reign her in and take posed pictures.  These have their place, but while you have such young kids it's not the easiest.  So, until next year, we'll stick with these.  :-)

PS - There are 2 more pics but I didn't include them because they are on our Christmas Cards this year.  I'll post them after the cards are mailed out (and received).