How we get our family photos

I had to laugh at Aly's comment about getting our kids to sit still for our family photo. And Aly has again inspired me to write another post!

The nice still shot of our family in no way reflects the process it takes to get to that moment in time. This is a very difficult process and one that I now dread, but here is the story of our family photo journey.

2005 - Sam is born, mid November. Just about the time that I am getting Christmas cards ready to mail. I always love to get photos in Christmas cards and knew that I would do the same once we had kids. Sam was only 8 days old in this family photo, and had fallen asleep so it was not a hard photo to get, less than 10 photos.

2006 - Ben & Carlee are born in October and we have 3 babies under one! Family photos and Christmas cards are the last thing on my mind. At least until November and Thanksgiving shows up - which is when I traditionally mail my Christmas cards. So we have to dress three kids and ourselves, get them all into the triple stroller and walk down to the place I chose for taking the picture. Here are some of the highlights of this photo ...

• Ben & Carlee slept through most of it and I can't move because I am holding onto to two newborns
• Sam wants to have nothing to do with being held, he just wants to run as soon as he is let out of the stroller
• Daddy chases Sam until he giggles, Daddy catches him and races to where ever I am sitting, time enough to snap one or two shots before Sam screams to be let down. Daddy lets him down and chases him all over again.
• This photo was one of about 15 shots taken

Notice that in the photo, you really aren't sure if Sam is laughing or screaming. He is screaming.

2007 - After Ben & Carlee turned one I realized that it was time to get the famiy photo. So we got everyone dressed and went to a beatiful location that would have the ocean behind us. This was an absolute disaster. We could not get any of them to sit still. So we drove to a park that was a little safer - not so close to the street and tried again. Another disaster. This photo is the most important one for the whole year. In my mind it is the only one we need to get and so I was really upset and grumpy and didn't know what to do. We were walking back to the van, defeated but willing to try on another day, when I decided that maybe if me & Daddy sat on the grass maybe they would just climb on us and maybe we would get a decent shot. Well, we got this one, it was one of the final shots out of about 50.

2008 - Now as you can imagine, I am dreading getting this year's family photo. But I thought with three extra adults (one with the camera and two to be clowns)it might not be to bad. Wrong! I even decided that we would take the photos in our yard so that we could take some shots and then let them run around for awhile before trying again if we didn't get it. It sort of worked, the first few shots the lighting was wrong. The next few none had all the kids looking the right way and my white shirt drowned out the color - I changed. I looked at all the shots and realized that in nearly all of them, none of the kids were smiling. But by then it was lunch time and nap time.

Later we tried again. Sam said "but we already took pictures!" Smart kid, but smarter Mama said "but nobody was smiling nice in them. So we have to try again, and if everybody sits nice and smiles nice then we will all get a treat". We had to keep reminding them about the treat and it seemed to work. We tried several different poses, mostly to give the kids a chance to move around. We took about 70 shots to get this one. I think we were saying "Candy" instead of "Cheese" to get them to smile! Good enough for me!