The Honest Mom’s Guide to Holiday Family Photos

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The Honest Mom’s Guide to Holiday Family Photos | Columbia SC Moms BlogIt’s that time of year y’all, the holidays are coming. This statement is not meant to cause mass chaos, but act as a warning. Quickly approaching holidays also means holiday cards (the bane of my existence). Get yourself ready for the hustle with this guide.

Photographer

Scourer the internet for hours to find the perfect photographer. Said photographer must provide a cute holiday (but not too holiday) themed backdrop for your photos. Their style should be a perfect combination of the six different photos you’re basing your shoot off of that you found on Pinterest.

Wardrobe

Spend a total of six days in varying department stores collecting pieces to create the perfect coordinated but not to matchy family wardrobe for the shoot. Two days before the shoot, lay outfits out on bed and snap a photo and post to your favorite Facebook mom group and ask for input. Receive mixed reviews about your color and pattern choices. Decide that everyone is right and start over. Find awesome handmade boutique pieces on Etsy and arrange with shop owner to overnight. Dress the kids in their stylish one of a kind pieces and load them into the car for your onsite styled shoot. Arrive to realize that one child has pooped/spit up on/got a hold of food and thus destroyed their outfit. Put everyone in original outfit that the internet hated and smile pretty.

The Session

Bribe your children with any and everything under the sun that they love to get a half way decent photo. Offer anything ranging from ice cream to a trip to Disney World. Use yourself as a barrier between children to keep them from poking and touching each other and otherwise ruining every photo. Spend 25 minutes of your 30 minute mini session convincing your stubborn and shy middle child to quit being a koala, sit on your lap, and face the photographer.

Proofs

Once you receive the proofs from session, have the harsh realization that your photographer really did their best in picking the ones, from the probably hundreds taken, to provide you this selection of one child looking here, one over there, and that one where everyone looks great and you’ve got some RMF (resting mom face) because you’ve had enough.  

Cards

Pick the one where everyone looks great (except you, because it’s reality) and slap that baby on a hand-styled matte postcard layout from some boutique on Etsy (recommended by the lady you got the outfits overnighted from). Spend a small fortune ordering enough cards to send to every person you, your partner, your mom, and your mother-in-law have ever met. Find a spare moment to stop at the post office and get a thousand holiday themed stamps in anticipation of the arrival of your cards. Spend 12 sleepless nights handwriting the addresses on every card and adding stamps.

Find stack of addressed and stamped cards under the seat in your husbands car in February when your leaving for your trip to Disney World.

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Katie Stevens
A transplant from the frigid winters of New Hampshire, Katie and her family moved to the ‘Famously Hot’ Columbia in Fall 2015. She is married to her high school sweetheart Richard, and together they have three little humans; Maddox (5), Thatcher (3) and Chloe (10m), and a dog, Cabela. Katie spends her week days at her 9-5 in at USC School of Medicine, rushing her oldest to soccer practice, and letting the kids have cereal for dinner, cause ‘ain’t nobody got time for that’. The weekends (which she lives for), are spent at the state park, the zoo, or a magnitude of other fun places. As a fan of calligraphy, hand lettering, and DIY projects that all require hours of free time and buckets of money, you can find Katie scrolling Pinterest during late night feeding sessions, filling her boards with beautiful projects she’ll never have the time to do. Katie also enjoys spending her ‘spare’ time running her blog From North to South.

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