I know for a fact that a few of you have heard this story. Like, literally heard the involved cries within the greater Chicagoland area on the actual day of occurrence. Well, I’ve brought it back because I was inspired by NickMom’s fabulous 2.6 Seconds Before The Family Holiday Picture cartoon. (Have you played around on the NickMom.com site? You really oughta.)
So here’s my story of holiday awesomesauceitude:
They were playing so nicely together. Well, “playing” is a relative term, since one of them was a newly minted two year-old and the other still technically a newborn…but I was a brand spanking new mother of two children, so this was the equivalent of sugarplums dancing in my head. They were going to be the best of friends! Parenting two kids was way easier than the horror stories I’d heard! I should take a photo to commemorate it! Yeah, and it’ll be our Christmas card picture! (Sugarplums can sometimes= insanity pills.)
Did I mention that my daughters were already clad in Christmas jammies? Whether I had been feeling festive or too lazy to get them dressed for the day is of little to no importance, but the fact remains that they were holiday-esque.
So I put an elf hat on the baby. And got my camera.
And that’s when things began to fall apart.
Oh, sure, for a few moments things were hunky-dory-ish: Nora continued to smoosh her infant sister in the pillows which, up until that moment, had been a belly laugh-inducing (if slightly terrifying) game. But no longer. Now that Susannah realized something was atop her head, it was game over. No smiles. Certainly no pictures.
I really should’ve stopped with this one.
But I persevered. Because, sugarplums.
I managed to take a few pictures where, while my kids weren’t exactly a Mini Boden catalog, they weren’t the poster for The Shining, either. I kept clicking.
“Listen, try moving her around a little bit more.”
Zuzu, getting angry at This Thing On Her Head, began to baby-rage. And Nora (always a sensitive youth), began to react to her sister’s reaction. With tears. Louder tears. Which startled the heck outta the baby and made her go red in the face with sorrow. Which provoked Nora into even louder tears. And so forth.
I kept clicking.
Oh, she’s FINE.
“Somehow,” my deranged inner monologue convinced me, “Somehow a sunbeam with burst through these storm clouds and they’ll suddenly hold hands and this INCREDIBLE PICTURE will present itself for the taking.”
And it totally happened!
If by “sunbeam” you mean “the baby nearly fell over in apoplectic rage and the final shot of the session including the two year-old leaning angrily out of the picture at the last second.”
So that’s the one we used.
“Fa la la la la, la la la la.”
I think we can all agree it was a keeper.
***
For more tales of holiday joy, check out the always #MotherFunny NickMom and be sure to follow them on Twitter!
Or you’ll make a smallish, Christmas-clad baby cry.
And no one wants that.
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