Christmas Card Fails

It's been two years since Jay and I attempted a Christmas card with all the critters, so I decided this was the year. It was going to happen. In my mind, I could picture it - the horses all standing nicely in their American Mustang halters and their Christmas scarves, lined up behind us, and Allie-bird sitting nicely on the ground in front of us. It was going to be perfect.

However, I've been around animals enough to know that what I want to happen and what actually happens are two different things, so I had a back-up plan.

After I decided to make the horses scarves, I decided that we were going to get pictures of the cats too and made them scarves. They were Not Thrilled.

I set up a mini photo studio (read: red fleece draped over a chair that I could plunk the cats down on to snap a quick picture) and started chasing them down.

Pongo was after the treats and didn't want to sit still.

Gizmo has a demon inside her, I think.

Speed Racer is going to kill me in my sleep.

Eventually, I did get pictures of the cats that are usable, not perfect, but usable. I turned my focus to making the horses' scarves. I wasn't sure how long they needed to be, so I took my first attempt out to try on Skeeter.

It wasn't nearly long enough and she tried to eat it.

I doubled the length, added some fake snow stuff to the ends and tried again.

This time, both Skeeter and Pearl tried to eat it.

I realized that we had a big storm coming in, so my window for getting the "perfect" pictures was closing. Jay was off today (Monday), so I took a personal day so we could get the pictures done. I expected it would take an hour.

It took three.

Instead of the perfect card I had imagined, we ended up having to go with our back-up plan of individual pictures of each horse. The wind was kicking up and we've gone one heck of a winter storm moving in, which made the horses a bit full of themselves.

Miss "Cranky butt" Pearl

Skeeter "the Goofball" Bang

Copper "I don't wanna" Casanova

I was not kidding when I said it took three hours to get the pictures of the horses. The girls were fairly easy to catch, but Mr. Copper was a turd. It took lots of work to get him caught. Lots of work.

We finished with the horses and ran into the house to change into not-horse-snotted clothes. The wind was really kicking up by then and our window of opportunity was closing very, very fast.

Pongo the photobomber and Allie-bird just wouldn't cooperate.

Eventually, though, we did come up with picture of all of us that we could use to make a passable Christmas card.

The thing is, I kinda wish we'd used all the outtakes for our card - they are a much more realistic view into our world.