Christmas Portraits with a Toddler

I am so glad my morning was a success and is over with! I had an appointment at Penny's for Andrina's Christmas portraits today. All in all, it was a success but the experience was really difficult to deal with. For starters, toddlers generally don't do well sitting for portraits. Andrina certainly didn't when it was time for her 1 year old ones. In fact, it was so bad for those that she cried and was cranky the entire time so we had to do those twice. So I was not looking forward to today's Christmas ones.

Andrina did not want to cooperate with her portrait sitting. She was walking all over, trying to walk out the door. When I'd sit her down, she'd either get up and refuse to sit back down, or she'd start crying. As if me asking her to sit and be still for 5 seconds was taking away from her freedom. Well, yes techincally it is but it's only for a little while! There were a few quiet moments when she was standing up and looking at the Christmas tree there. And she did turn to the camera and kind of smiled so the photographer got a good shot with those (and that pose is her "official" Christmas one for this year). She did sit quietly with a Christmas book so we got some good shots of that. The worst of it was when she was crying and reaching for me when I stepped about 4 feet away from her, out of the shot. She really was acting like I was going to abandon her. Towards the end of the session, I literally was singing and dancing behind the photographer to get her to be happy and smile. Thankfully, it worked! I had to sing the "Elmo's World" theme for her and I danced for her too. But it worked and there were about 6 different "poses" of her that I bought portraits of. I also had our Christmas cards made from those and all will be ready to be picked up next Wednesday. But they gave me the envelopes today so I can address them by next week.

My goal is to get all 50something envelopes addressed by the weekend. I did want to do a family portrait for our cards this year, but I can't go through that again! One Christmas photo session for Andrina is enough. Hopefully she's be better able to deal with it at Easter time.