Washer and Christmas Pics

Our washer broke again yesterday. That would make four times in about one month. Lucky for us we bought a service plan when we bought our washer. I'm pretty much on a first name basis with the repair guy now. I don't even have to escort him to the washer when he gets here. He knows right where to go. Between coming to check it out and having to order a part and coming back to install the part he has been here five times in the past month and has to come again this week. The good news with that is that as long as the repair man finds something wrong with it on thursday it will be considered a lemon and Sears is going to buy us a new washer. Well I can tell you there is definitely something wrong with it. I washed a load of clothes and they came out dry! It looks like I will be heading to the laundromat (did i spell that right?) once again. And it looks like we will be getting a new washer for Christmas, or shortly thereafter. What a pain in the behind though. Do you have any idea how much laundry accumulates around here in a week? Not to mention a month!?!? I went last weekend and did twelve loads. Seems everyone else likes to do laundry on sunday afternoon too so I was there for four hours. What fun.

I had this great idea that I was going to get out of planning a trip for Christmas pictures of the boys. Usually it requires a trip to Gainesville and very careful planning of time so that they are both in a cooperative mood ... not hungry, not tired, clean diaper, clean clothes, haven't been sleeping recently so their hair is a mess, etc. And after being strapped into the car for about 40 minutes Houston has to let off some energy before there will be any "sitting pretty" going on. After the last pictures where the photographer about lost her cool I thought I would try to do them myself this time. BAD IDEA!!! I tried today, after putting it off for a few weeks, and was not very successful. I couldn't find Houston a Christmas shirt or outfit or pj's or anything so I decided to do jeans and santa hats. Easy enough, or so I thought. I even got some big candy canes to use as props and put a bench in front of the Christmas tree so it could be our background. What a mess it turned out to be. My lighting was all wrong and I couldn't get them both looking at the camera and smiling at the same time. About five minutes into it all Houston decided he was done. Then I couldn't get Brody to look at me because he was too interested in Houston running through the house with this big candy cane. And since Brody has started crawling he longer wants to sit still. I did manage to get a couple of decent shots but nothing with both of them in it that's worth printing out an 8x10 of. I'll post some here for your enjoyment.