Christmas Cards

I meant to type this a few weeks ago and forgot.  As many of you have probably noticed, you did not receive a Christmas card from us this year.  Don't worry, we still love you and didn't send one to anybody.  No, we aren't scrooges.  We are annoyed, cheap perfectionists (or at least I am).  Snapfish had cards on sale right after Thanksgiving and I was going to order cards then.  Earlier that week, my sister in law and I decided to take our children to a professional to try and get a good picture of them together to give to my in-laws for Christmas as we can't ever get them to sit still and I figured I would use one of those in the Christmas card.  Ta Da!  Cards and gifts done in just a few days, I am a genius!  Well, the photographer we got a Potrait Innovations was very nice but didn't do that great of job of distracting toddlers for a picture and the pictures we got were ok....still good enough for gifts and cards though.  I considered buying their cards but holy moly, they are expensive (hence the cheapness).  Oh well, I'll just use the free cd to make cards like I always do, I thought and left the studio sweating (I mentioned photographer didn't engage the toddlers so my sis-in-law and I had to jump up and down like idiots to get ok pics) but with photos for gifts at least.  That evening I uploaded the pics from the cd to discover they are EXTREMELY low resolution and were going to be blurry even in the smaller 3X6 cards where the picture is the size of a wallet print (annoyance and perfectionism starting now...).  Sears and Olan Mills both gave cds with the ability to at least print 5X7's so I thought there must be an error but Portrait Innovations informed me that all their cds are low resolution which begs the question of why even offer a cd?!  I'm really annoyed at this point and my cheapness wanted to order right then (as sale ended that day) and my perfectionism didn't want to wait as I know myself and I wouldn't mail them until next year if I waited any longer.  Then I had the epiphany to eliminate stress and not send any and donate the money I would have spent on cards and stamps.  So I did.  Next year I promise to get my decorations out earlier and take pics myself to avoid this mental meltdown happening again as we have really enjoyed all the cards we received this year!

Curse of the extra camera

We are fortunate to have over the last five years acquired 2 cameras: my fancy rebel and a smaller "point and shoot" canon. I love my fancy one because the quality pictures but the small one takes pretty darn good pictures plus I can throw it in it's bag in my purse instead of lugging around the other one. The problem is I always forget to download pictures off of both cameras and end up with pictures from oh, about 3 months ago....

Mom-ma's birthday in September...

 Getting some love from the great mom-ma at the family reunion in October (only 2 months ago, so not too bad!)

Trying to get eaten by a goat at family reunion 

Dada's birthday with me smiling at the camera (can you hear the angel chorus singing hallelujah?!  oh wait, that's just mama singing off key...)

Gig'em while working in the country! 

Family photo from Thanksgiving 

Showing a baby calf with a sick mommy some love.  He asked about the cow and calf every day until Pop-pa reported that both were doing better!