Last Saturday I took B over to our local-ish Picture People to get some Christmas photos taken. We weren’t originally planning to get them done – we have her Santa shots from last month and I used one of those for our card that went out – but since it’s her first holiday season and my camera totally sucks, I really wanted some nice photos to commemorate it. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Picture People…I had heard really great and also really terrible things about them and the online reviews I saw for the one near me were generally pretty bad. Also, as an artist myself, I tend to be VERY picky about who takes pictures for me. Like as in ‘we drove all the way to Ohio for our engagement photos because I found a photographer I liked that much’ picky. Surely I was going to be far less than enthused with mall photo studio portraits, but the prices seemed reasonable and we had nothing else to do that day, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Now you might be thinking that I am crazy for going to the mall 3 days before Christmas and I will freely admit that it was not the most intelligent decision I’ve ever made. I was temporarily fooled into thinking it wouldn’t be too awful when it only took 5 minutes to find a halfway decent parking spot, but inside was a very different miserable holiday story. The Picture People was MOBBED. There were kids everywhere, which was loud and migraine-inducing, but also a really good thing because B loves other kids so at least that would keep her occupied. After having just read that they aren’t real keen on sticking with appointment times even if you made one way in advance, I prepared myself for a long wait and figured I’d just leave if B got fussy.

Long story short, they called us back in no more than 10 minutes and we only had to wait another 15 max for our photos. Color me pleasantly surprised.

And the photos? OMFG.

It helped that B packed all of her ham and cheese with her that day. She is usually pretty good about having her photo taken, but she was loving every second of it!

Those are 3 of my favorites, but there were 16 others to choose from, so in the end I absolutely could not decide which ones I wanted and got them all on a disk. (With the rights to do whatever I want with them, such as attention-whore them all over my blog.) Was it more than I wanted to spend that day? Yeah probably. But it’s her first Christmas and these memories are priceless.