Christmas Pictures!

I'm not gonna lie, I was stressed out about getting Christmas pictures done with a 9 month old baby...I knew that it would be mass chaos at Portrait Innovations (where we have been getting Lyla's pictures taken) and I knew Lyla (and mommy) wouldn't have the patience to wait an hour or two before getting our pictures done.  I called and scheduled an appointment for first thing in the morning, making sure we would be the absolute first customer of the day and that there would be no way that they would sneak in anyone ahead of us.  I got lucky and booked the ONE day that they weren't going to open up earlier to get started on pictures. When we got there, I breathed a sigh of relief, because we were the only people in the studio.  I thought it would be perfect, and kept saying how we were always going to make our appointments for first thing in the morning because it was so nice and quiet.  So we get Lyla dressed in her beautiful Christmas dress from Aunt Karlee, plop her on the set, start making silly faces and waving toys around, and .... nothing!  Lyla pretty much refused to smile for most of the pictures, which is SO unlike her!  (Like the night before, she absolutely cracked up when she threw her pacifier at the lap top and it bounced off.  We kept her occupied by doing this for 10 or 15 minutes.  We were all in tears from laughing so hard!  Not at the pacifier throwing, which really wasn't funny at all, but at Lyla's deep belly laugh!)  Anyway, we tried every trick we knew to get her to smile, and she just wasn't having it.  At Lyla's 6 month pictures, she layed the charm on thick.  She laughed, cooed, giggled...she was super model baby.  Not that day!  To top it off, Chad was supposed to cut his hair the night before (he is very anal about his hair--I'll save that for another post) and he never got around to it, and I was sick with a cold so I looked like I was half dead.  To say the least, we were looking pretty rough!  We managed to squeeze out one or two half decent family pictures, and lucky for Lyla, she is adorable, smile or no smile :)  Here are just a few from our photo shoot!

This one cracks me up, she definitely is refusing to smile here!

All in all, the pictures went well enough...we didn't have to wait, there were no tears, and we got some Christmas presents taken care of.  I guess I can't complain too much!  Merry Christmas!