Family Pictures

We had a friend take some family pictures for us this year.  We had a very tiny window of time to get them done one afternoon, and I'm pretty happy with the results.

These are the original, uncropped versions.  I photoshopped them to get them closer up for the final versions that I had printed.

My kids are so cute:

Abigail's Blessing Day

We recently invited our families to our church for Alan to give Abigail her baby blessing.  He did a beautiful job, and it was fun to visit with our families afterwards.

 Abigail's blessing dress was also worn by Evelyn and Maggie.  It was crocheted by my dear friend Jennie, who also taught me how to crochet before Jared was born.  The booties were made by my Great-grandma Derrick (so Abby's great-great-grandmother) and have been worn by all of my other children as well as me and all my siblings when we were babies.

So excited for her big day!

 Failed attempt at a good family picture before church:  Evelyn was not in a happy mood and Maggie has a hard time looking right at the camera.  Still.

Grandma Curtis

Grandma and Grandpa Stout

Train Tracks

We had to cross some railroad tracks on the Corona Arch hike, so I took a couple of photos of the kids.  It would be fun someday to take photos on train tracks when we are not wearing hiking clothes for a chilly day and where our hair is not all windblown.  :)

I asked Maggie if she was pretending to be a ballerina, and she said no, she was an arch.  Ha ha.

Of course, she is not looking at the camera.  

Family Pictures, cont.

Evelyn cried every time we tried to take a picture of the whole family.  The rare times she wasn't sobbing, then one or both of the other kids looked bad.  Therefore, we did not get a SINGLE picture where everyone looked good.  Lame!  It was an extremely frustrating time.  

Soooo...Alan and I tried doing some photoshopping.  We have not tried it before, and we weren't using the official "photoshop" program.  Just some program called "Paint" on our computer.   I think sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't.  Ha ha.  Here are our favorite three photos with their amateur fix-ups.  Which one do you like the best?

Pose number 1 original:

Photoshop attempt #1 of pose number 1:

Photoshop attempt #2 of pose number 1:

Pose number 2 original:

 Photoshop attempt of pose number 2:

Pose number 3 original:

Photoshop attempt of pose number 3:

Really, I feel my options were so limited to try and find a good photo.  What am I to do?

Family Pictures 2014

Recently my good friend took our family pictures.  Here are some of my favorites of the kids. Oh, how to decide???

I will post the pictures of the whole family in another post.  I will spare you all the outtakes (although some of them are quite hilarious.)  

Family Pictures 2013

One of my friends took our family pictures a few weeks ago, and I finally got them from her computer.  I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.  I still need to work on cropping and some coloring issues, but I'm excited to get them printed and on my picture wall!

Maggie has turned into such a princess

This was the one and only picture we got of Evy by herself where she is sort of smiling

Jared is looking so grown up to me!  When did he get so big?

Maggie looks so adorable in this picture!  I think it was the only genuine smile we got out of her the whole photo shoot

I think this picture above is my favorite family picture (despite Jared's cocked head), but I need to tweak the coloring so we don't look so washed out.

Family Pictures Preview

So, I have lots of Halloween pictures to post, but I haven't loaded them on my computer yet. Instead, you get a taste of what our family pictures will look like this year. I had my amazing friend Cindy take them for me. She was sooooooo patient despite the meltdowns that Maggie was having every 10 minutes. Cindy is so sweet. She won't let me pay her since she's not very experienced (not like I can tell--they look wonderful to me!), but I will babysit for her for HOURS to make up for it.

I'll start with some of my favorites (although I haven't cropped or enhanced them at all yet) and then maybe post a few outtakes. Unfortunately, I deleted some of the most hilarious outtakes (they were wretched!) , but you can still get the idea. We did not get a single good picture of just Jared and Maggie together.

Unfortunately, this very well might be the best family picture we got. I guess it's semi-decent.

I'm trying soooooooo hard to learn to not crinkle my nose in pictures...

OUTTAKES:

Not sure what Jared's scowling at...