Family PIctures

Every year my sweet cousin, Kate, offers to take our family pictures.  I love it for all sorts of reasons, but mainly because she's good at taking pictures and I finally get to be in some of them since I am always the one taking the photos.  If you look at my blog, it looks like Mike pretty much cares for our kids by himself. I'm extremely unphotogenic so it doesn't bother me that I'm rarely in the pictures.

So Friday night I went shopping to get coordinating outfits for the boys.  That part was fun :)

Saturday morning we drove over to the Iron Furnace.  The stone buildings and architecture are really neat.

We were very prepared.... trains- check, blanket- check, fruit snacks- check, candy- check, chocolate-check, baby wipes to clean chocolatey faces- check. 

We had talked to Owen the night before about how he had to be cooperative during our pictures.  He said he would and then proceeded to show us some poses.  "I know what to do mommy.  Sit like this..." and he'd show us this really cheesy pose and Mike and I would look at each other ready to die laughing.  He was very serious though.

The minute we got to our location and Kate got out the camera, Owen started to show her his poses.  OH.  MY.  WORD.  He definitely gets it from his daddy :)  And he's definitely going to be super embarrassed about this when he's old enough to realize how funny it is.  Here are some of his poses...

Anyway, I'm not gonna lie.  It was bad.  Very, very bad.  Adam was up before 5am that morning so he was as fussy as can be.  He was not feeling like hamming it up for the camera like he sometimes does and refused to do anything we asked him to do.

If we wanted him to sit, he'd stand.  If we wanted him to walk toward us, he run away.  If we wanted him to look at the camera, he would turn his head.

"Owen, please stop squeezing his head!"

Maybe would have been a good picture if I didn't have a hair in my face and Owen wasn't choking his brother.

We kept bribing the boys to sit and smile nicely and we'd reward them with a fruit snack (or 5).  We also had some leftover Halloween candy.  Bad idea.

Chocolate in hand= happy Adam

Mouth full of fruit snacks.

 

Fifteen minutes into our photo session, our boys were on such a wild sugar high.

This picture speaks for itself.

So after a few different spots and trying to get at least one good picture, we decided to call it quits and head home.  I downloaded the pictures that Kate took onto my computer.  She took over 200.

We MIGHT have gotten one good picture, however I don't like how I look in the picture so I probably won't send it out as our Christmas card.

 

I really wanted pictures of the boys together (without Mike and I), but that wasn't happening.  Adam flat out refused. 

Kate was so patient and flexible and we're so appreciative that she was able to take some pictures.  I think hope next year will be better.

Owen was completely over it by this picture.