Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Everyone! We had a great day and I hope you all did as well. I'd love to write a post about - you know - our actual Christmas. But I'm completely and utterly exhausted. December has a way of completely sucking the life out of me every year. Maybe it has something to do with the FIVE family birthdays that fall between November 16th and Christmas Day - all culminating in the mother of all holidays. Every year I swear I'm going to do it better next time - and I always find new and exciting ways to drive myself to drink.

So! Instead you get to see the super fun process that was creating the 2009 MasterWong Unspecified Holiday Card. I have not yet joined the ranks of the smart people who just pick the best family picture from the year before. No instead I need to 1) find the "perfect" holiday outfits for the kid(s) and 2) get everyone posed together for a super picture. I learned this year that the addition of one child pretty much makes the above goals impossible. So after finally procuring a holiday-ish dress for Lily that I didn't hate (thank you Hanna Andersson) and realizing that I was not willing to pay the prices photographers wanted to procure actual digital images - we armed ourselves with Gordon's tripod and tried to do it ourselves.

The experience was - ummm - educational.

We started with Lily - and you know, no one told me that kids get MORE difficult to photograph as they get older. I mean what's up with this new "smile"?


But I guess any smile is better than this:


After a few rounds of this type of thing I looked like this:


Eventually we banished Lily for a little while citing "lack of cooperative spirit" and focused on Quinn. He's easy to photograph if you give him something to distract him - like this stocking ornament. Take note of the white paper tag attached to it please (ooo foreshadowing).


He started chewing on the ornament - and we started taking pictures - because Look! Cute Baby! and At Least It's Not Glass!


In all the picture-taking frenzy we failed to notice what was happening to the paper tag. Here, I'll give you a chance to spot it. Can you top our superb parenting skillz and determine what's wrong with this picture?


Well, we couldn't. Until Quinn looked like this:


And then puked up half of the paper tag from that stocking into Gordon's hand. Sorry no picture of that - even we're not THAT bad (besides, our photographer was busy being puked on).

But even with that bit of excitement Quinn was still totally our photo superstar of the 2009 MWUHC:



We did cave in the end and let Lily have another shot. We never got anything fantastic with her in it. But thankfully she's pretty cute, so we were able to salvage a couple for the card:




And- that's all folks! Hope you had a super fantastic day today! We're heading to New Jersey soon so maybe I'll have some time to play blog catch-up while we're there and the kids are otherwise occupied creating havoc with their cousins.