It’s that time of year again to order Christmas cards!
Actually, it was that time of the year about 3 weeks ago, I know, we’re super late. I had the best intentions to get this done in November, but my best intentions weren’t quite enough this year. All in all, we managed to have a great time getting our pictures taken and I’m so happy with the way they turned out!
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Choosing Our Theme
This year, I wanted to do something fun, so I forced kindly asked everyone to wear an ugly Christmas sweater for the occasion! It actually wasn’t too hard to get them all to agree, which was surprising. They were kind of happy they didn’t have to look like lumberjacks this year like they did on last year’s Christmas cards.
Target had an impressive selection of ugly sweaters. They even had an ugly sweater dress for my daughter to wear. She has her own special sense of style, so she was actually thrilled to wear that ugly sweater dress!
The only one we had trouble finding a sweater for was our little one, Jacob. You would have thought the whole city decided to put an ugly sweater on their little boys because there wasn’t one sweater for little boys anywhere! We finally found him an ugly shirt that was slightly too big, told him it was a sweater and he was cool with it. Phew!
Our Christmas Photoshoot
Last year, we took our own pictures with a tripod. It was quite tiring for Ryan to run back and forth to get in the picture every time. This year, we were blessed to have someone take the pictures for us! My friend Angella, who is a photographer, is starting to do family photography so she offered to take our picture to get some practice. She was great and she did such a wonderful job at getting some candids of us in between shots.
We wanted our pictures outdoors this year so we went out to Market Street and got some great shots in front of the giant Christmas tree. There’s beautiful Christmas decor all around Market Street so it wasn’t hard to find good spots for our picture.
We wanted individual pictures of all the kids. They all obliged and the older boys even had a little fun while their pics were being taken. I love how their personalities came through!
Jacob, of course, provided the entertainment for our shoot.
Jacob complied for a few minutes and we managed to get some great shots of him with his older brothers and with mommy! It was a fleeting moment but we got the shots!
Here’s a great shot of my daughter and me where she proudly shows off her ugly sweater dress!
Here are a few more of our favorites!
By the way, those boots I’m wearing are my new best friends! I love them! I have real issues with the cold and they’ve been amazing for keeping my tootsies warm!
Creating Our Photo Cards with Tiny Prints
Well, as I mentioned before, we were quite late this year getting our picture taken. Thank goodness for Tiny Prints! I used Tiny Prints last year as well after comparing several different online card services. You can see why I chose them here.
New Home, Same Great Designs, and Experience
This year, Tiny Prints now has a new home on the Shutterfly website. It was still just as easy to choose and set up our card. The interface is so easy to work with. It’s simple to choose different designs and play around with all the options to see which you like best.
I played around with a couple of styles but loved this one from the beginning. I like that it has the option to put several pictures on the back so we could share a few of our favorites with our friends and family.
They Even Thought Of Us Last-Minute Mamas
Back to being late on sending out our cards. Lucky for me, Tiny Prints has a service where they will mail the cards out to your contacts directly. That’s just what I needed in order to get them to my friends and family before Christmas! I had to input my contacts’ addresses manually since I had them in an address book, but they also have an import feature. I’m happy that now the addresses are all in there and I’ll be ready to go next year.
And Finally, Our Cards Have Been Finished and Mailed Out
I’m so happy with the way they turned out! What do you think?
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