Family Pictures!

Family Pictures...the thought of them about gives me the hives.  The anticipation of getting 8 of us ready to take pictures that will define "2014," while having everyone clean and smiling is about enough to prevent me from doing them.

Which is why we hardly ever do family pictures.

 When Beautiful was a baby, I think we did pictures about once a year.  I remember one year she was sleeping before the appointment at Walmart and I had to carry her to the car.  Once we got to Walmart I realized that I had not brought her any shoes...  We went to buy her a pair but I kept talking really loud about how I was silly that I forgot her shoes and so had to buy her a new pair.  I was working at the prison at that time and was quite paranoid that an undercover security officer was going to assume I was shoplifting.  Yeah, I have lots of life altering experiences from working in prisons for 9 years.  But...on with the family pictures.

Once Buddy was born we still managed to take pictures about every year or so, but they weren't necessarily taking professionally.  Then came Grace.  To take formal pictures when we didn't know if she would be a part of the family...or to wait???  Then 4 days before her adoption was final and we could take family pictures Superman and Faith came.  We thought we would have them adopted soon but it took another 18 months...so we never got it done.  Quite honestly, the thought of taking 3 toddlers and 2 older children somewhere to take a formal pictures was way WAY too overwhelming.  Then our church directory picture was done in July of 2010 and we got a formal family pictures!!!!...then JJ came less than a month later...

When JJ was 1 we went to a place a friend recommended in Lincoln.  We were pleased with the photos.

When JJ was 2 we did the amazing photos that are shown on the side of this blog.  They are done every other year by a mom's group south of Aurora.  I LOVED the experience.  The price was even decent - for us it was about $200 to get all 6 of the kids pics, in costumes, group and individual, all of the actual physical pictures in all sizes AND the disk to get as many more as I wanted or used them electronically and in photobooks.  We thought we would do it again this year.  However, the only downside was that my husband and I weren't in the pictures.

So, we did not do any pictures last year and this year we decided to get whole family pictures with a local amazingly talented photographer.  And we did them today:)

I could almost say that preparing for this experience was more stressful for me than our impulsive 7 day in advance planned trip to Disney World this spring.  I am NOT a person who cares about or even has on my radar screen anything related to "looking good."  I am practical and functional.  Most of our clothes come from hand me downs.  I HATE shopping.  One reason I was thrilled to be gone from working for the Dept. of Corrections is that I no longer had to adhere to a dress code.  I may be more casually dressed for what people expect when they come to my office, but I am comfortable lol!  Monochromatic colors work great as they don't clash with anything.  Denim is my friend:)

So, trying to think of how to find 8 outfits in our house that would all match up was... AHHHHHHH!  I tried going with all green when there were only 4 of us and it was not a good outcome.

So, I decided we would all match.  We would all wear WHITE!

We went to Kohls and we found white shirts.  We couldn't all find matching white shirts so just Beautiful and I wore different shirts from the rest, although similar to each other.  It was good enough!

Props - I left that to Beautiful.  She loves Pinterest and she really is very creative.  She came up with a list of ideas and showed me some adorable pictures that we were able to do.  I am really excited to see how they turned out.  But, for me, a prop is a nice background while we sit generically in front of it smiling.  I would never think of creative things.  I am thankful for Beautiful's ideas in that area.

So this is what today looked like after all of the anticipation stress:

I got up and fed all of the kids turkey bacon and eggs.  Trying to make them happy and compliant;)

Then I did my hour on the treadmill and listened to praise music to get me ready...

Then I had to IRON all of the shirts.  IRON!!  I really dislike ironing.  I usually iron about...3 times a year if I am really unfortunate.  I burned myself.  Probably because I am so out of practice.  

About then I realized it was noon and I still had to shower...and feed people again.  I realized that I still had not eaten yet today other than some turkey bacon (I counted it as protein and a snack for my diet lol!)  I got that done.  Thankfully there were plenty of left overs from my husband spending all day yesterday smoking...chicken;)

At that point I made a crucial decision.  I decided that just like on an airplane when one needs to take care of themselves before caring for others - I had to get ready first.  It ended up working out well as everyone else was on the "last minute" schedule.

So... hair!  Ugg.  I don't usually do a thing to my hair.  So, trying to figure out how to do my hair for all of posterity is a stressor.  Faith got her hair done by a friend awhile back and that was the catalyst for me to say "we are going to get these pictures done soon while she is still cute from that style!"  lol!.    Beautiful is always gorgeous.  Grace's hair is stick straight.  How to keep it out of her eyes?  Buddy's hair is long - how to keep that looking nice when it is wavy and...long?  The other 3 guys I just buzz their hair as I can't handle dealing with any more hair lol!

I told everyone to find a pair of jeans and report back to me in them so I could approve it.  Faith could not find jeans that fit her (that girl is growing...and curving.  I am not sure that Beautiful's hand me downs are going to work for her...sigh...).  So, I had to dig through the hand me downs totes in the addition and try to find a pair of jeans that would fit her.  I finally found some after she tried on quite a few.  Whew.

Got everyone pottied, dressed, and told them the expectations.

I grabbed all of the Disney World shirts that I had ironed and on hangers to do a quick change in the van after the other pictures.  I hustled JJ out of my bedroom in front of me and he sneezed...then proceed to turn around and grab, yes, you guessed it, a handful of the t-shirts in my arms and wiped his nose with them!!  I told him to stop and pulled the shirts away...then he then grabbed HIS WHITE SHIRT and started wiping with that!!!!!  Thankfully nothing appeared to be permanently amiss and I got us all in the van.

Now all that I had left to worry about was...

Smiles.  Some of my kids can do a genuine smile.  Some...not so much.  To get them all to have a genuine smile AT THE SAME TIME?!?!?!?!  

Distraction...how to get them to all look at the camera AT THE SAME TIME?!?!?!

However, the photographer was GREAT.  She personally knows all of us so she didn't get frustrated with the distracted ones, or when JJ decided early on that he had taken enough pictures, or when I hollered out too many orders to my kids and disrupted her process, or when Buddy laid on the ground in pain from his broken toe and didn't do what the rest of us were doing.  She had great ideas and was more than willing to incorporate some of our ideas.

I am also glad it was local.  I didn't have to dress people up and drive over an hour hoping people were still clean and happy with unwrinkled clothing.  When it was over we were home within 5 minutes and enjoyed ice cream and lemonade (well, all the kids got ice cream;)

So, family pictures are done.  It actually made me a little sad.  In all likelihood the next time we will do formal family pictures is at Beautiful's wedding.  It just occurred to me that if I was stressed today I will be REALLY stressed that day...

Oh well, no sense borrowing stress.  I am thankful for today's pictures and for our family.  I am looking forward to putting these pictures on the wall and remembering that no matter how stressed I got about the pictures, we have a memorable and fun snapshot of our family in 2014:)

Now if I can just get my husband to get the family pictures framed...from the past 10 years;)