easter

I had one simple goal in mind for this Easter: get a picture of my whole brood, including mommy and daddy.  Every Easter this task gets a little more daunting, and I always get a little Easter-picture anxiety.  Am I the only one?  Turns out this year my anxiety was well warranted.  Do you know how hard it is to get ONE picture of six people all smiling (or at least not unsmiling) and looking in the right direction with their eyes open??  I can show you how hard it is...   Go ahead.  Click on the pictures and make 'em bigger.  Some of these you gotta see close-up to appreciate.

This one's our bad.  The kids are essentially fine (Kellen would disagree), but my hair and whatever that face is Sean's making... Wow.  

How can ALL four boys have their eyes closed?  And again, my hair.  Thanks, Mother Nature.  And Sean, if you were wondering, was mid-sneeze.  It was super pollen-y out that day.

In case you were starting to think Elliott was perfect...

It didn't take long before Cade was totally over it.

We thought a change of location might help, so we went behind Sean's mom and dad's house.  It was less windy, but more sunny.

Did I say it was less windy?  Never mind.

I assumed, incorrectly, that one of the gazillion pictures Aunt Allison took would be good, so I let Sean go inside and change.  I was wrong.  I made him get his Easter duds back on, and we went out side and tried again.  This time I pulled my hair back to see if we could at least eliminate that issue.  And though Cade is asleep and Elliott is barefoot, we managed to get one sorta decent shot of the crew.

As if it weren't hard enough to take pictures, this was the kind of stuff going on between shots:

I did take a few individual shots of each of the kids.  These are much, much easier.

After I was done torturing them with family pictures, the kids had their annual Easter egg hunt.

Little kids hunted in the back yard, just like last year.

And big kids were in the front, engaged in an all out egg-battle.  Wyatt even wore gloves for better hand traction.

Cade, of course, was just hanging around.

And I have to include a pic of our little nephews, Gavin, Nolen and Cohen.

I guess I should've started the post with these pics, since this was from first thing Easter morning.  I wanted you to see what Elliott's hair looked like, if only briefly.  I hot-rolled her hair for the first time.

When we were done she looked like she was pageant-ready.

Don't worry - we have no intention of entering her in any pageants.  Absolutely NOT.  But I bet she'd win if we did.  ;-)