Wishing You A Cajun Christmas and a Hootin'-Hollerin' New Year

Because our long-term memory is a little rusty, we thought it would be fun to take an updated family photo this fall.

For every perfect shot like the one above, we take about fifty like this one:

Seriously.
(See below)

All in all, as with most things in life, we do the best we can with what we've got.
And we have quite the cast of characters around here!

Merry Christmas from the Simpson Six to your family.
Here's hoping that our home will roll somewhere near yours in the coming year!

Christmas Cards, Revisited

So we finally got our Christmas cards in the mail this week. After completing that venture, I wanted to come back to say just how thrilled we are with Tiny Prints, both with the quality of their work and the service that they provided!

Their site offered very fast turn-around on our custom cards. From submitting our order until they were in our hands with standard shipping was barely a week--including the Thanksgiving holiday! They communicated every step of the way with where our order was at in the process--and with fast-turn-around, that meant we received updates 2-3 times in one day while it moved through their offices. Most importantly to us was that they followed our special instructions with formatting and printing exactly as requested. We've definitely found a new go-to shop for our family's custom printing!

And if they can make this motley crew look good, that's an added bonus!

213 Photographs

Beautiful autumn days like today make me forget that winter is just around the corner, and with winter comes Christmas and all of its accouterments.

One of the items that always sneaks up on us is creating our family Christmas card with updated photos. In between baking up a storm to fill the freezer with goodies for the coming winter, cleaning up the yard and winterizing all of our small engines, we took advantage of the gorgeous weather to take our annual family photos.

Our family tradition is to photograph our Christmas card photos ourselves--including a self-portrait of the entire family. With six people and 4 of them being between the ages of 1 and 6, this was no small task this year! 213 photographs later, we have a few usable pictures--mostly individuals or pairs--and a lot of fun memories captured on the camera.

This year we are trying a new source for our Christmas cards (Tiny Prints), and are very excited to do something a little different. Tiny Prints is also offering a sample of their holiday cards to bloggers this year, so we decided to check them out. They have a very large selection, and we love the options that they have for including photo collages, since our photos of all six of us together turned out more humorous than typical "holiday card worthy"!

Jason has spent most of the evening selecting photos, editing and fitting them into the card of our choice. Based upon the raw photographs, I was skeptical, at best, that we'd be able to turn out a quality product this year, given the quantity of the silly or squinty faces that at least one of us were sporting in most of the shots. However, after Jason worked his magic, I'm very excited to place our order and see the finished product. It will still be heavy on the personality, but I suppose that's largely the point.

While we're not quite ready to reveal our finished product from this year, here are a few of our "out-takes" from previous years family portraits for your viewing enjoyment:

Getting 6 smiling faces, looking at the camera is hard!

We have teary-tantrum Lydia, Vomiting Ian, and Caroline thinks it's all hilarious!

Lydia's hair is only slightly more distracting than the Yak shirts...

Caroline has never been lacking in enthusiasm!

Before there was the Simpson 6...there was the Simpson 2...not all that long ago...