christmas card photos

I was planning on posting these last week but the flu made its way through our house and it never happened.  Thankfully, we all survived.  Three of the five of us had it fully although we are thinking that the other two had it a bit because they shared some minor symptoms without the fever.  It was also my birthday on the 29th while I was getting over the flu so that wasn’t very awesome but we made the best of it and I had a pretty sweet day filled with lots of love.  Now that life is getting back to normal I have time to write up a couple posts.

A while back I mentioned that when we took pictures of the kids for our Christmas card, that to make it work to get all three smiling AND standing near each other AND looking at us, we played a game of counting to three and then throwing leaves in the air.  So, we have lots of pictures of them actually in the process of throwing those leaves.  I really love some of those outtakes and promised to share some of them.  (And as a side note, when you start looking at the word outtake a lot it starts looking really weird and foreign.)

First, as a reminder, here is the picture we used for the card.  It is while we were counting to three and there was the anticipation of the throw, so they were all excited.

Now here are some of the fun ones.  I love the energy and joy shown in them.

Love, this last one! …the spin, the running, the smiles!  A sweet moment caught on camera.

We usually have to take hundreds of pictures to get one “good one” but there are often quite a few that are favorites even if they don’t make the cut.