Family photos

Sometimes it seems like there is just so much going on that it's overwhelming to blog about it all. That's not to say that anything exciting or important has really been happening but our every day life has gotten pretty busy and hectic with Brendan in school and trying to entertain two energetic boys. But I do have a couple of exciting things to post about- one being our trip to Colorado to visit with Chris' family for a super special occassion, and two being our family photos. I'll save the Colorado trip for another post since that will take much more time but for now, here are some of the photos that we had taken.

We ended up going to an indoor studio called Fotofly, which offers an amazing price for a 45 minute session. I missed our window of opportunity to take photos in a picturesque locale here in Utah so we opted to go this route even though I would have preferred an outdoor shoot. Oh well. You snooze, you lose. Lesson learned.

I was pretty surprised that we were able to get a decent amount of good shots during the 45 minutes. Alex was happy (when we were in a group) and Brendan was being a good listener so it worked better than I thought. I was a bit anxious about how well the boys would perform. Turns out I didn't need to worry about them- it was Chris I should have been more concerned with. He was not a good smiler that night so a lot of pictures that would have otherwise been awesome, turned out like below...

Brendan gave him some pointers so hopefully next time we'll have a better result. Still, we got a lot of great family group shots that I'm really pleased with.

The boys were really the stars of the photo shoot and honestly, I cared more about getting good shots of them than anything else.

Brendan was a natural and responded really well to the photographer so we got some super adorable shots of him.

 This might be my favorite, hands down. It's getting blown up and put on the wall for sure.

I love this one too. He looks so big though!

Alex's individual shots didn't turn out so well that night though but luckily they have a satisfaction guarantee so we were able to do a short 15 minute re-shoot and we got MUCH better ones. He liked the photographer more and I learned from the last go around that even though he loves balls, using one to get him to smile for photos doesn't work. It just makes him angry because he can't hold the ball and throw it. The photographer this time stuck to Cookie Monster and Elmo dolls, which got way better results.

Gah, the cuteness of this pose kills me. I just love my little man. Seriously, my heart squeezes every time I look at this one.

And this is such a classic Alex kind of face (he chews on his lower lip a lot). I'm glad they caught one of these and luckily not one of his famous scowls- although that might have been really cute just because it's funny.

I'm so glad we had these done and I'm so glad my friend Lindsay told me about this place (Thanks, Lindsay!). It has been ages since we've had nice photos taken (I think it was before we moved to New Hampshire almost 5 years ago!!!) and we definitely needed to capture some images of our little family while the kids are still young. I love the stages that they're in and I know I'll look back at the pictures down the road and reminisce about how sweet and cute they were.