Thursday, December 1, 2016

Blogmas Day 1!


DECEMBER IS FINALLY HERE!!!  Christmas is my absolute favorite holiday.  Love it, love it, love it!  Red and green are my favorite colors.  I love all the decorations.  I love all the warm fuzzy feelings this time of year tends to bring out.  I love the Christmas specials.  I love the music.  I love it all!!  Now that's not saying that this time of year is also hectic and potentially quite stress inducing.  Especially if you're like me and you tend to place a lot of pressure on yourself to try and meet every one's expectations, fit in as many of the festive gatherings as possible, and still find time to enjoy the holiday on your terms.  It's a challenging juggling act that has me simultaneously wishing December was longer, while also being thankful that it's not.  Since I'm trying to keep myself on the roll of blogging, I love this time of year and I needed a self proclaimed challenge to keep my Christmas and dog juices flowing, I decided to task myself with the challenge of blogging every day.  Initially I thought I'd take part in the Vlogmas "challenge" on YouTube and task myself with creating a video and/or video blog every day, but I pretty quickly realized that I was in no way prepared to spit out that kind of content and put in the time editing videos on a daily basis.  So I decided to start a little smaller by challenging myself to blog every day in December (hence the Blogmas title) leading up to Christmas.  The blogs will be a combination of pictures and video that are Christmas related and based around our various excursions throughout the month.  There will be some training mixed in as well as just the usual randomness that is our life.  This is a challenge that I think I'll be able to handle.  I guess we'll soon find out!


On this first day of Blogmas, I wanted to share with you the picture taking process for our Christmas card shots that we did back in October. :) Getting these pictures taken is always a bit of a process.  I like the outdoor setting, which means that there are going to be plenty of uncontrollable distractions.  Not to mention we're in public, which means that there are bound to be people who want to come up and say hi to the dogs.  Luckily for me, one of those people was my friend Annie!!  Thankfully, she was also willing to help wrangle dogs while I got them dressed in their holiday attire, as well as helping to get their attention behind the photographer (my every patient friend Andy) so that we could get the right shot.  Naturally, there were some entertaining moments.






For the shots with the rock wall in front of me I was able to wear my nice comfortable foot wear.  But my original plan was to wear some cute, sparkly green heels that I have to complete the whole red and green look.  Heels really only work for nice firm ground.  Most of the park was NOT nice firm ground....


We (and by we, I really mean Andy) realized that not only is it difficult to get both of the dogs to look in the direction of the camera, but it's also difficult to get me looking at the camera at the same time that they are....



And in case you're wondering, yes, we walked around a public park looking like this, in October.


Our next challenge, was trying to get a decent picture on a path in the woods while squirrels were frolicking in the trees just a few feet away.  It did lend itself to a few moments where Dominic decided to just free stack.  Could I get someone to double handle with a squirrel at his dog shows???





There were so many pictures that I love for a variety of reasons.  Only one made the Christmas card cut, but I am in love with so many of these shots!

And with that, I wish you a happy December 1st (for previous Christmas fun posts that I've done, just browse through the various years of December posts on this blog) and I'm off to do some distraction training with the dogs!

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