Christmas Card Pictures

This year I finally had the perfect excuse to get the Christmas card family pictures that I had been wanting for years... baby belly. Well, kinda. I figured we could do a Merry Christmas / We're Pregnant Christmas card this year. Unfortunately, my belly hadn't shown up to get the whole pregnancy theme across. So we had to improvise a bit. I poked my belly out as far as it would go and arched my back some to help emphasize the bump. You can see "it" in some pictures but not all.

We had a great photographer, Anna Schmidt, to take our photos. She had tons of ideas to combine the pregnancy and Christmas theme. I told her what I had in mind and she literally blew it. She has this ability to capture light that just makes the picture stunning.

The day of the shoot it was extremely cold and windy. Of course, with our luck, we would have that weather with an outdoor photo session. We tried to keep our jackets off but it was very hard to do. The wind also made it very difficult to get good pictures with our props. We spent more time waiting on a break in the wind than we did taking actual pictures. Ha!

This was Auburn's first trip to a park. I know, bad mama! But she doesn't have very good manors so it is hard to take her places with other animals and humans. She either barks at everything that moves or attempts to meet everything that moves. I think she knew we were doing something important because she behaved well. Getting her to look at the camera versus everyone else was a bit of a challenge but she did sit still when asked. Even better, when we tied her up so Doug and I could take pictures without her she sat still, kept her eyes mostly on us, and didn't bark her head off. For a second I thought someone switched her with another dog. Ha!

So here are a few of our favorite pictures from the day. I am saving the ones we used for the card so you'll have to stay tuned for those. :)