A Special MOMent & Our Holiday Card Outtakes

If there’s one thing many moms stress over during the holidays, it’s sending out cards. It can be a daunting task. There’s making the list of who to send to, ordering cards, addressing, making sure you’ve got enough postage, mailing them on time, keeping track of who sends them to you so you send one in return & the list goes on. But the biggest challenge is getting the photo to put on the card. Recently, at a holiday party, someone said to me “I loved your card! How do you always get such a great picture?”. I thanked the woman, but laughed to myself, thinking “my goodness, if she only knew how many pictures I had to take”.

I will admit, taking pictures this year stressed me out more than it should have. We tried a few different times. I finally came up with a card & ordered it just in time to mail them out. As I was addressing them, in a haste, I stopped & looked at the card. I mean, really took a few minutes to look at the sweet little girls on the card. I thought about how someday, years from now, I’ll look at this picture, think it’s the most beautiful picture and how time really does fly by too fast. I won’t remember the 4 days it took to get the picture, how frustrated I was or that I broke out in a sweat in 40 degree weather trying to wrangle them close enough together for a picture. Someday, I will treasure each and every picture I have.

This realization was one of my many MOMents this holiday season. This year Sprout started a fun site to keep track of all our MOMents. The holidays are crazy, but they’re also a special time to create lasting memories. At Sprout, they want to celebrate every last one: our MOMents. It’s a lot of fun to browse their site and see other Mom’s special (and hilarious) pictures. You can also create your own.

Having a 2 year old & 3 year old at Christmas is magical. It’s also a bit hectic & a tad overwhelming. Through it all, it’s best to stop enjoy the little MOMents along the way. Here are two more MOMents this season:

After I mailed out the cards, I decided to take one last peek at this year’s “outtakes”. Now that the stress of mailing a good picture was behind me, I could really appreciate the humor of the “not so great pictures”. For all the moms out there that stressed over their holiday card pictures this year: I hope these make you laugh and feel a bit better about how hard it really is to get a good picture!