Family Photos

I wish it weren't so hard to get a good family picture. Make sure everybody is looking and/or not crying, everybody is sitting up straight, make sure I'm sucking in my stomach, extending my neck, not having too gummy a smile and not doing a crinkle nose. (These are all tips I've gotten from people over the years.) The real trick is getting all of these things to happen at the exact same second. This really nice guy came over and took family photos of all of us during our family reunion but it really was too late at night and all the kids were tired and sick of listening to their parents, plus the parents were tired after having had a long day of dealing with children who didn't want to listen so we all had to work extra hard. If Gavin wasn't looking, then it was Tati not listening. We were finally going to get a good shot when she announced that she had to pee so Greg ran off with her and then after she peed, she wasn't going to take any more pictures and plus there were plenty of other people to get their pictures taken too. I guess I had built it up too much in my mind that the picture would turn out awesome. You should never do that. Anyway, this is the result and if I were a lay man, I would say it turned out great but there's something you don't know.

Tati has this "gift" of knowing just how to drive me crazy sometimes and something that she does is this underbite thingy. She does an exaggerated underbite. It digressed into an underbite smile and even underbite talking. It started out as a joke and we'd always correct her thinking it was going to ruin her teeth. After talking to two dentists about it and having them both tell us that it wouldn't ruin her teeth, we backed off a bit and she actually was able to stop the joke. But then she started to do it just to bug us in moments when she was in trouble and or talking to her after a time out she would do what we've termed as "yucky teeth" (no offense to you underbiters out there--if she couldn't help it, it wouldn't bug us so much). So as I'm going through the 2 shots where Gavin and Tati are both looking and lo and behold but what do we have? The yucky teeth smile. Seeing her have this smile (and p.s. she did it throughout the entire photo shoot) just undoes the joy of having a picture of our entire family.


I know I'm being a bit retarded here, but there it is, that is the truth. I don't want to sound like I'm a psycho mom or that I have to have my children look "perfect" for photos because I don't but that is just the truth of this photo shoot.

Here is the one of everybody. We worked a little photo shop magic and tried to get everybody at least looking and somewhat looking good. Then here are some of the siblings and their families and some of the Fab-5, the original children.
These are all my siblings.


And this one is supposed to be like those old fashioned pictures when nobody smiled. Except that I was having a hard time not cracking up in most of them.

I don't know how models do this whole picture taking thing as a career. I guess because they don't have their children with them.