like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks

This week, I have acquired a new appreciation for our annual ludwig family christmas pictures... Every year growing up, we'd grab a friend (or a tripod and a camera with a timer) and set out to take a photograph where all six of us didn't have our eyes closed, were smiling and looked fairly decent. There are some notable exceptions (in the family pic of 1989, my eyes were puffy from crying - I'm almost certain it was because I was being a disobedient punk and got in trouble), but most years we pulled it off.

I didn't really realize the magnitude of this feat until I had burke. See, I have just one baby and our digital camera offers me the luxury of endless chances to catch that 'perfect shot' without the cost of developing film. All of this going for me, and I still rarely get a great picture of him. Add his cousins keadryn and sayla to the mix and it becomes a comic impossibility. Even just getting three babies to look your way involves a ruckus of clucking, singing, dancing and hand motions. And then the glances are so fleeting and not at all simulataneous, causing a drastic reduction in my standards for 'a good picture.'

Thus, I have been in Lubbock for five days, taken 109 pictures and the one at the top of the page is our best one yet (both sayla and burke looking at the camera and kead being sweet to burke!). On the other hand, the number of pictures with one of the babies crying, hitting someone, trying to smash someone else's heads into the mattress or grabbing someone else's hair, is plentiful. See below for a fabulous illustration of several of these phenomena wrapped into one candid photo.