More Hints on Holiday Cards

Now that we’ve gotten hints on how to take the perfectholiday picture from Kate, I’d like to offer a few of my own perspectives. Now that you have your pictures, I’d like to talk a little about Christmas card layout.

It seems whenever I open a Christmas card these days, I have the same heartfelt reaction: “Who are these children?” There, smiling up at me are one to three darling, well appointed, beautiful children whom I have never met in my life.

See here’s the thing. If we went to high school together, or college together, or you are childhood friends with my wife, or our mothers play bridge together, there is a real possibility I have never laid eyes on your children in real life. The last time I may have seen their likeness, if ever, was on last year’s Christmas card. You see your kids every day, but I don’t, and trust me they’ve changed a lot since last year.

So please, please, put your picture on the card somewhere. Your picture. The Adults. It doesn’t have to be the big picture. You can be off to the side. Or better yet, make the adults the big picture in the middle and put the kids small on the back. Put your names in big letters with arrows drawn to the person named. This would be a huge help with the kids (which one is Breanne again? Are they in order by age or the order they are standing in this picture?). I’m telling you, that would really make my holidays happy.

Here’s another hint: Use your names. Your full names. Half the time I struggle to remember who “Jeff, Gina, Haley and Chloe” are. Sometimes the last name isn’t on the card. Sometimes only the last name is on the card (Merry Christmas from The Rowlands!). Come on, people! Sometimes the last name replaces a maiden name that I once knew (how do we feel about cards saying “Seasons Greetings from the Martins nee Smith?”). The point is, full first and last names are the way to go.

And sometimes, and this is happening more and more as I age and the kids destroy my memory, I do know your first and last name but man, a visual reminder would sure help. So, once again, please put a picture of the adults on the card. Any other memory triggering clues will help. If you could take your picture in the location where we met, that would be great. Ages would help a lot, too.

To summarize, here’s an example of great Holiday Card:

Happy Holidays from the Rowlands

Jeff Rowland (38)

Gina Rowland nee Smith (36)

Haley (7)

Chloe (4)

 

(Plus a nice note) Hey Ol’ Buddy! Been missing you since our moms quit playing bridge together after you moved from Tulsa!

 

 

 

Here’s something I almost forgot, and this harkens back to my post on dogs. Some people insist on putting their dogs on their holiday cards. Please, stop the madness. Combined with my points above, I have literally gotten Christmas cards with a picture of a child and a dog, and I can’t tell whose name is whose (Merry Christmas from Jack and Hunter!). So once again, if you absolutely insist on putting a dog’s picture on your card… I can’t even complete the sentence. Dear God, make it stop!

Since I’m on the subject, think you could do the same with your Facebook avatar? Yes, we are “friends” but again a little visual reminder would help me out a lot. Please make it a picture of you, from the relatively recent past. I can’t always remember who you are from the picture of your kids, or a Barrack Obama logo. And determining your identity from your baby pic is no easier than from a picture of your baby. If you absolutely must include your child or significant other in that less-than-one-square-inch of real estate, well, I suppose I can live with that.

It’s just that easy! These simple steps can greatly improve your Holiday Card/Facebook profile. Your mailing list will thank me.

Yours truly,

Robert (your buddy from KiddleDad blog and/or we went to school together)

The Perfect Family Holiday Shot

 

Follow these simple steps and you can create
gorgeous holiday card pictures like this one!

As the holidays approach, we thought our readers could use some helpful hints to help make things more manageable. Today's blog is a guest post from Kate Rose, who brings us her expertise in today's post - The Perfect Family Holiday Shot:

What annual occurrence causes my pulse to race, my palms to sweat, and my lungs to constrict with each breath?  April 15^th, you ask?  Taking my kids for their flu shot? A visit from the in-laws?  No. None of these occurrences cause the fear, the frustration, the anticipation, and (hopefully) the eventual exhilaration of, wait for it…capturing the Perfect Family Holiday Shot.  That’s right, that picture which will go on our annual Holiday Card. That picture which will hang on the doors of friends and family for an entire holiday season.  That picture, which defines our family unit as well as my worth as a mother.  That picture which conveys all that we are pretending our past year together as a family unit to be (educational trips to the Botanical Gardens, flawless piano recitals, siblings embracing while singing at church).  In reality, though, what we want our family definition to be and what our family definition actually is (peanut butter causing an eyelid to stick shut, tantrums at the mommy-and-me music, goldfish-crusted car seats), are usually two very different things.

There are many steps that go into creating the Perfect Family Holiday card, from cropping, printing, mail merging, and stamping, to shoving those things into the big blue mailbox 3 days before Christmas.  While those are all important and tedious steps, today I am here to tell you about the most important, agonizing, heart-wrenching, wine-inducing step of them all.  We will refer to this step as “OBTAINING THE PERFECT FAMILY HOLIDAY SHOT” 

There are two schools of thought regarding the Perfect Family Holiday Shot, and I am going to briefly address both, and provide some valuable tips to help ensure your card will be the envy of all your family, friends, and of course, the all important frenemies. 

The first option (and one which my family has subscribed to for the past 5 years after 3 years of trying option 2) is:

OPTION 1: Starting January 1^st, take a camera everywhere, and torture your spouse and children by snapping shots ALL.THE.TIME. 

1.)    This option does require the entire family to dress nicely every day.  Or at least be showered.  Or maybe just have combed hair. 

2.)    You never know the time and place that the magic moment will occur…are you all together at the dentist, Dunkin Donuts, the grocery store?  Don’t hold back!  Snap, snap, snap and quite possibly you will end up with the perfect family shot (no one will ever know you were all at the DMV!)

3.)    (In direct opposition to number 2) Consider your background.  Hey, everyone looks happy at the beach!  Who doesn’t love walking through the woods! Even the most terrible-two-toddler can look cute making snow angels! 

4.)    Know your family’s limits.  If your 3 year old (for some God-forsaken reason) cannot understand how to ‘peak out’ from behind a tree, then he just can’t understand how to ‘peak out’ from a tree.  Leave it.  Don’t yell.  Don’t compare him to his siblings at that age.   Don’t take 80 shots.  Just leave it. 

5.)    Bribe, bribe, bribe!  (“I’ll give you an M&M if you’ll peek out from behind that tree!”) 

 

On to Option 2.  I’m going to be honest here…Option 2 is not ideal…I mean, go for it if you think your family has the wherewithal…I am going to give some tips, but really, I mean, really think about this before you commit…

 

OPTION 2:  Take your family to a photo shoot

1.)     Probably only have one kid (or less) if you are considering this option.

2.)     No drinks.  Nobody!  Or anybody.  Nobody drink anything for at least 24 hours before the appointment.  Parents—this is so there won’t be any puffy eyes or hang-over signs. You CANNOT be the limiting factor in these pictures.  Kids—nothing worse than breaking the photographer’s rhythm because Jonny “has to go potty”, or worse… “just did”. 

3.)    Identify the weakest link.  Does mom have a tendency to do “pouty lips” in pictures?  Does Bobby close his eyes when he smiles?  Does Mary scream when separated from her “My Little Pony” doll?  Whoever the weakest link might be…yell, threaten, and bribe.  Fix it, people. 

4.)    The photographer is joking when he asks if the family brought a change of clothes.  NO!  Are you kidding me?  You think anyone can drag three kids here in their holiday finery, snap a few shots, and then change their clothes? 

5.)    These professional places take 300 digital shots for a reason.  All you need is ONE.  Identify it.  Pay for it.  Mail it out. 

 

In summary, this post is titled “The Perfect Family Holiday Shot” for a reason.  Regardless of whether you decide on Option 1 or Option 2, I really wanted to call this post “The Perfect Shot”.  Because that’s what all parents will need after attempting to get the beloved holiday picture.

Dogs

"Want me to, hmmm, deficate on your rug?"

Every so often, Andrea says that she might like to get a puppy. All I can think is, “are you nuts?” You don’t have challenges enough already that you want an untrained juvenile animal running around your house? You want stains and surprises everywhere? You want holes chewed in your carpet? You want dog hair on all of your clothes? Not to mention the furniture - Cody wetting himself on the dining room chair, as he sometimes does, would be like an expert refurbishment compared to what a dog would do to it.

Never mind that Andrea is – ahem – a clean individual. The kids are – ahem – not. And dogs are – ahem, ahem – really not. Our children making messes creates enough friction. At least they are flesh and blood offspring and some evolutionary emotional restraint kicks in before things get too severe. I’m not sure what would save poor Fido.

I’ll be honest and say that I simply do not understand the desire to get a pet. I have nothing against them, really, but it is simply not a compulsion that I feel. I would no sooner snuggle and hug and kiss and roll around on the floor with a dog than I would a sheep at the petting zoo. As far as I can tell, pets are almost as much work as children without the (for me) emotional reward.

(In case you can’t tell, I’ve softened my statements in the paragraph above. This is because you do not want to get on the wrong side of dog people, who can turn violently insane at rhetoric like that above. So therefore, dog people, I want to take a moment and be perfectly clear: It’s not you, it’s me. It is totally normal and rational to want another species in your house defecating on the floor and destroying your possessions. I obviously have a deep character flaw.)

Here’s our one family experience with pets: One summer, at the church picnic, the kids won two goldfish as prizes from one of the games. My reaction was “oh man, God hates us,” which didn’t take too long to prove true. We found the burden of feeding a goldfish daily and washing the bowl weekly to be too much to bear. Goldfish are normally a short-lived species. This was true for us for one of them, who met his demise within three weeks. For the other, we apparently got the Methuselah of goldfish. 18 months after that church picnic, we were still faithfully scrubbing his bowl each Sunday and counting down the days to his passing.

As the pets get bigger than fish, the commitment only increases. The tank you have to clean gets larger. The weekly scrubbing gets harder. I know people who literally have to schedule vacations around their pets. I just don’t have the time or patience for that nonsense.

Therefore, we will never, ever, ever, ever, ever have another pet in our household so long as I have a say. Which means that, someday, we will have another pet.  Because I don’t really have a say. The world, it turns out, does not function on rationality. Otherwise, Gucci and Hummer and the band One Direction would be out of business. And the species would probably be extinct. Because, let’s face it, having children is about as rational as having a dog. Children don’t tend the farm any more. We don’t need them to fend off saber-tooth tigers. But some of us, the crazy ones, manage to convince ourselves we do need them to help clean the dog doo off the carpet.

How does a Wookie brush his teeth?

All parents know that Chewbacca works hard
to keep his pearly whites battle-ready!

One benefit when Cody turned four was that he finally outgrew his morbid terror of brushing his teeth. Tooth brushing, which should be a quick and easy – even pleasant – undertaking, was a real challenge with Cody. Cody would fight and squirm and complain that I was hurting him while I brushed his teeth. I’ve always had very good dental hygiene and take it seriously, so when it’s my turn to aid with brushing I try to do a thorough job. Cody hates the thorough job.

To gain compliance, I had several tactics at my disposal. My native tendency – grabbing him roughly and screaming at him to brush – had obvious drawbacks. So instead, I had to get creative. Cody, as he’s aged, has evolved in his likes and dislikes, and so therefore my teeth brushing methods have evolved with him. Begging and pleading isn’t sufficient for the job, so I, as a grown man, became a twice daily circus act in the kids’ bathroom.

It all started with “Robot Toothbrush,” which goes something like this: Daddy stands and moves very stiffly and mechanically and repeatedly says (in his most metallic voice) “Robot Toothbrush. Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner.” The ner-ner-ners should coordinate with the up-and-down or side-to-side motion of the toothbrush in the mouth. Robot Toothbrush lasted for the better part of the two’s with decent success – so much so that Andrea started using it on her turns as well. As a side note, it’s one of life’s great joys to watch Andrea, whom I consider one of the most buttoned-up people I know, saying “Robot Toothbrush. Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner.”

Times pass, and the fascination with robots has faded (unless, of course, the robots turn into cars or shoot people, which makes them super cool). So we lapsed back into begging and pleading mode. That is, until our latest Star Wars craze and the advent of “Wookie Toothbrush.” Wookie Toothbrush means Cody and Daddy open our mouths as wide as possible to allow guttural Rrrrrowwwwaggghh sounds to come out… and the toothbrush to go in. The toothpaste suds foaming at the mouth helps with the analogy. Pretending to be a Wookie buys you a solid 15-30 seconds of quality tooth brushing.

In between Robot Toothbrush and Wookie Toothbrush, for a time I was grasping with straws. For a while the fascination was with super heroes, so we tried various forms of “Super Hero Toothbrush,” such as “C’mon Cody, want to brush your teeth like… er, um… Spider Man?!?!?” The problem is, it turns out that Spider Man brushes his teeth more or less like everyone else, so Cody was never really convinced. (This week’s challenge is for you to come up with Spider Man inspired tooth brushing method).

What finally solved the issue, once and for all as far as I can tell, is Cody turning four and deciding he can brush teeth all by himself. Cody can now lightly glaze the toothbrush over a subset of his teeth for 3-5 seconds and consider it done. It ain’t thorough. It ain’t hygiene. But at least we are back to raising a human boy and not a Wookie or Robot.

Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner!