Merry Christmas!

(First, I’ve been exceptionally dilatory about this blog, and I apologize.  I will do better in future.  I am currently wearing sackcloth and ashes, which is good because sackcloth is awfully accommodating of bulging midsections, but bad because it’s exceptionally hard on the upholstery).

Anyway, today I learned an important lesson.  It is, for those of you who are interested, an EXCEPTIONALLY BAD IDEA to go to a photo place to get pictures taken the week before Christmas, because you will meet with hordes of people, all of whom have waited for the week before Christmas to get their pictures taken, and the atmosphere is frantic and full of children who are having their hair brushed for the 17th time, and would rather not.*

It took us 2 hours to get the pictures done.

2 hours. 

Ugh.

Margaret had to get her game face on for it.

Luckily for this year’s Christmas card, she took her game face off after just a moment. 

By the end of the ordeal, however, she was feeling quite tired.

Posing is hard work, you know, particularly when RIGHT OUTSIDE the place you’re posing, there is a LEGO TABLE and people are playing at it, making a mess of all the Legos that she had just tidied up.

Before she ran out of steam, though, we got some good pictures.

Here she is in “standing in front of the Christmas tree looking gleeful” pose.  What she’s really looking gleeful about is that her mother is standing behind the photographer, making mad monkey noises and balancing a plush monkey on her head while dancing up and down.

We then moved to a chair, which she had been eying for a while.  When we went in, she went and sat in it and had to be separated from it for the first round of pictures.  And it is a pretty cool chair, and just her size.

We then moved to a “lying on the floor looking at a book” pose. 

The problem with this one was that Margaret wanted to read the book, which meant that we had some trouble getting her to look at the camera, and when we had gotten shots that would work, she wasn’t done reading yet.  Life is very hard.

So they tried to distract her with fake milk and cookies and a weird Santa arm.  And here’s how that one went":

Cookies and milk?  For me?  How kind.

Hmmm, this milk seems to be stuck to the plate.  This is tricky.

Hey, this milk is a fake!  What the heck, Santa? 

We moved on to profile pictures.  In this one, I’m making boinging noises with my mouth while pulling my ears out from the side of my head.

And she pointed and laughed at me.

Then, wardrobe change.

This thing with her hands, she just did.  Good job posing.

And having figured it out, she stuck with it.

After this, we put her into ordinary clothes, and let her organize the lego table while I picked out which pictures to print.  Next year I’m doing Christmas pictures in July, when no one is there.

*I had an appointment for the week after Thanksgiving, but then Margaret began an interesting project of smacking herself in the face every so often.  I try to send out Christmas cards without visible facial bruising.  It’s one of my quirks.