Never a Dull Moment: December 2012

This year I knew I wanted to take some family Christmas pictures! For my Christmas card, and just to make a memory!

I started to think about what we would wear!

I looked through all my Christmas cards from previous years. I try to do a different color scheme each year!

We have never done much green, so that was my first choice! Ha HA Ha. Try finding something in normal Christmas green. Impossible. It is either neon, lime, too light, too dark, nothing Christmas Green! I looked online first, since getting out for that amount of time by myself is tough.

Found a few things, but couldn't find things to match with everyone else. I quickly decided it was going to be a casual picture. Everyone would wear jeans, and a 'hopeful' green top. Well that didn't happen.

After Pinteresting and looking online, I decided I was not going to try and find something in the SAME color for everyone! It actually doesn't look good in a picture, so I decided we would go all out Christmas style! Red, White, and Green! I found plain shirts for Abigail and Aaliyah and a scarf to add color pops, and then I already had a green and white sweater, so I just paired a red scarf with it! Michael had nothing and had to hit up the store for a some what matching outfit ;) Maggie and Madison were the problem. Seriously. Could not find 2 shirts in a 3t for them in any color I needed!

Finally the night before pictures, Michael met me at work and we went to find his outfit, and luckily find M&M a red shirt at Old Navy. Bonus was it was on sale $6, downfall was it was only in a 4. HA. They can still fit 18/24 months!! A 4 would be huge!! But we bought them in hopes, and the ended up working ok! I had to stick an old St.Patricks day shirt underneath to cover the big neck opening, and it worked perfect!

When I first starting thinking about family pictures, I was torn between whether or not to go somewhere, or hire a photographer? This past Thanksgiving I had set up the tripod to get a picture of me and the girls. (Michael had to work on Thanksgiving :( ) I remembered how well it worked out! So in light of the holidays and the budget I didn't want to try and squeeze in an extra expense, SO the tripod it was!

My original plan was to take the picture in our living room in front of our Christmas tree. Well when all 6 of us stand in front of 'our' tree, the tree disappears! lol

So I decided we would just go up to the Lawrenceville Courthouse and snap a few pictures around their beautiful decorations!

These were the best ones of the day!!!

I was beyond HAPPY with how they turned out!! Especially to be free ;) Madison was not very cooperative. But she was just silly enough for the right pictures!! So it all turned out awesome! We were there for no more than 20-30 minutes!

After pictures, while everyone was dressed Christmas-y, we went on up to Discover Mills to get a Santa Picture pass. I got one for 6pm, so we headed back to our side of town and went to Sam's. Grocery shopping and lunch combined! The girls favorite place to eat actually ;) lol. They are easy to please!
To much of our surprise I ended up running into my Aunt and her friend visiting from Canada there! They ended up having lunch with us, which was perfect!!

We dropped off groceries at home and then headed back to the mall to shop. Winter coats for Abigail and Aaliyah were on the top of the list! We got just what we needed and headed to go see Santa!! Because it was late in the day I figured they would be out of the ornaments to make, so I never mentioned it to the girls. They did enjoy the merry-go-round, picture coloring, Santa letter writing, and gun shooting game though!! They had a blast!!!

I went ahead and got in line about 5:40 so we wouldn't be waiting to see Santa forever! It worked great! Girls were PUMPED to see him!!! M&M talked his ear off!!