This story is not sweet or picture-perfect… but maybe there’s at least a lesson to learn, so bear with me.

Since we were with all of Andrew’s family for Christmas, we thought it would be nice to bless Jonas with them there. We blessed Adelina in France two years ago so it was mostly my family then. And it is rather special to bless a baby boy on Christmas day when you think about it.

But as much as I’d like to say it was all lovely and wonderful, it was mostly just stressful. It’s a pretty wild rush to get ready and go to church on a Christmas Sunday, after the stockings and breakfast, and luckily we all made it in time. Jonas was actually perfect and slept throughout the whole meeting and his blessing, so that was a relief. Adelina was a little hyper but she did OK thanks to Omi. The meeting ended and I wanted to grab a photo with the whole family. Of course, it was suddenly uncharacteristically cold and blustery in St George, so everyone was freezing, and did I mention the presents were still waiting at home? So this is the cousin photo we got!

It actually cracks me up looking back… real life right there! But at this point in the day I was getting really frustrated because Jonas was now screaming and Adelina was melting down because she didn’t want to take off her coat for the photo, and we have a very limited window of time to get this done… fine, let’s head home.

I really wanted to get a photo of our family because dang it, we’re dressed in our Christmas best and I’d like one stinking photo, right?! I’ve carried this baby for 9 1/2 months and looked exhausted and overloaded for months, so the one day I finally look nice, I’d like just one picture before everyone tears their clothes off! But no. This is the best we could do.

Double chins all around, Adelina was crying because she didn’t want her socks off, Andrew had immediately undone his tie on the 2-minute drive home because he wanted to put on his BYU tie that day (bowl game week), and Jonas wouldn’t calm down. So that was fun (just writing about this makes my skin crawl all over again). I finally just gave up, so frustrated I could hardly speak, and it was time to do presents anyway.

I know, you’re probably laughing at me right now… I wouldn’t blame you. Sometimes we do this to ourselves — have high expectations (apparently, getting a single decent photo is a high expectation these days) and get frustrated when they don’t hold up. Another life lesson to store away. I was just glad to be done with the whole ordeal and finally just enjoy Christmas.

And once I took a breather and gave up on my dream of a picture-perfect moment, it was a lovely day. Everyone just hung out and relaxed, the kids played with presents, we all enjoyed sweet Jonas and ate delicious food… simple things. I tried to get some photos of Jonas but once again came up short, so you know what I did? I dressed him up again the other day and did a photo redo. And that’s how I got the photos I actually wanted!

Moral of the story: don’t plan more than one “thing” in a day. It’s not worth it. Leave space for important things because it’s just too much to try to combine. Also, expectations… waaaaay lower. You’d think I would’ve learned that by now, but here we are again. In my defense, holiday expectations mixed with postpartum exhaustion are a little intense! So that’s the story of how poor Jonas’ blessing went down!