Bee happy!

Today was the dreaded day. It had been 4 years since our last official family picture, long before Griffin and Mia were a part of our family. It was long over due! I spent the last few weeks preparing-- by preparing I mean shopping so that we could all look so cute in our color coordinated brown and orange clothing. I got all the boys hair cut (apparently everyone is very upset about Griffin's cut--he looks a lot like the girls in the original Parent Trap). I was ornery all day today -- worried that Griffin wasn't getting a good enough nap and would be awful for pictures, etc. It didn't help that pictures weren't until the evening. That just meant I had more time to try to keep the kids clean and portrait ready. We decided to go to Little Cottonwood Canyon in the temple quarry site with all the granite and beautiful leaves around us for our pictures. Gavin did his best to prepare the kids on the drive up -- big kids need to listen and just smile the whole time so that when Morgan and Griffin are looking we can get a good picture. We set up for the first pose on some rocks. Morgan wasn't cooperating very well. She wanted to play with my necklace the whole time. We got a few shots. I haven't seen any of them yet but am really hoping one of these worked because we decided to move up the trail a little for a different view. We took a few pictures with all of us standing which once again didn't work because Morgan and Griffin wanted to play with all the driftwood and sit on some logs instead of standing. So we decided we would do a picture of all of us on this big piece of driftwood. We sat Morgan and Griffin on the log when Jack said something about a million bees being inside the tree. The next 15 minutes is one big blur. We picked up the kids and ran as fast as we could down the quarry on these huge rocks of granite. The wasps followed us. I had 5-6 that flew into my hair (guess I shouldn't have worn so much good smelling hairspray!) and stung me on the scalp. We frantically tried to swat them away off of Morgan, Griffin and Mia. We ended up with about 40 stings between all of us. After we all calmed down a little bit we tried to get a few more individual shots and a few of Gavin and me. Can't wait to see how great these all turned out after having to redress most of us, some good hair shaking trying to get the bees to fly out, and lots of tears and snotty noses! Good times!