Oh Toddlers...

This past weekend we went and had a mini session with my favorite photographer (Selena Stoney) in the hopes of getting some Christmas card worthy photos.  All week leading up to Saturday I had been asking Andrew if he was going to pose with his baby brother and smile for the camera.  Every time I asked he would nod and say "Yeah!".  He even said this on the way to Selena's house for our session.  I was feeling somewhat confident that he would cooperate and we would breeze right through our sitting.

Um, yeah. Not so much.

As soon as she got Elliot positioned and we asked Andrew to sit by him he starting whining "No!" and putting up a fuss.  Awesome.

We finally got him to sit by Elliot (somewhat) willingly, but then when we asked him to smile we got this:

or this:

Eventually we got a little bit of a real smile out of him - of course not looking at the camera:

She moved on to trying to get some pictures of just Andrew.  I was in the background begging him to cooperate and smile.  She was trying to entice him with a candy cane, so then of course he wanted the candy cane:

We moved outside to attempt some family shots.  Getting a 2 1/2 year old and an infant to simultaneously look at the camera and look happy was kind of an exercise in futility:

By the end Elliot was done:

I did manage to make a Christmas card with some of the pictures and was happy that we at least got some pictures of all four of us as a family.  My hopes of getting some sweet pictures of Andrew loving on Elliot were kind of dashed, but I did learn one important lesson:

Never trust a toddler.