I'm sorry friends, but I've been suffering from a severe case of writer's block lately.  Well, writer's block and the stomach virus, but there are so few details of that situation you would want to know about that I'm am choosing to leave it to the imagination.  Let's just say that it was me and the three kids here because poor husband is doing some fairly serious, can't miss, type audits at work right now, and since that's what pays the bills and all - my girl basically had free range of the house for a whole day.  And I had to call poison control.  Again.  We are literally on file.  Literally.  They can now pull her up using my phone number.  For serious.  This time it was a fairly large quantity of children's ibuprofin that I swear to you was closed.  With the child proof cap.  Honestly she is a Houdini.   

    So in a week I have only written once, and I was so disappointed in it's content that I didn't even link it to facebook because I thought it was lame-o.  If you haven't read it, don't waste your time.  Here are the cliff notes.  I stay up too late at night and see a lot of commercials for completely ridiculous things. Destruct-o-girl was sick all weekend, I don't give medicine for fever because I am evil, I took her to the movies while sick with no medicine because I thought she would actually be still, she vomitted all over creation.  Do you see how that could make for a lame story?

    But tonight my friends, I am actually kind of excited about this post.  "Why Cassie?"  you might ask.  Well, it is because I feel as if it is my duty in life to make you feel better about all of your "fails".  Those times you plan with the best intentions but they go all haywire.  Take Christmas card photos for example.  Everyone wants a fabulous picture of their cute little family to show how happy and lovely you are.  Problem is - we all know the truth.  Christmas card pics are awful no matter how you slice it.  Usually everyone is dressed "matchy" and in something that makes at least on person itch, the sun is always in someone's eyes, and heaven knows there is no way you are getting everyone to look forward at the same time.  Our family, in fact, attempted to take a card worthy photo, not once, not twice, but on three different occasions.  And while you are about to see three different and adorable sets of coordinating outfits on my weirdo, fantastic offspring, please know that my facebook status after round two read a little something like this -

        So tonight I attempted to take a Christmas card photo of my kids. Epic fail. It ended with me screaming, all three kids crying, and D trying to shove her whole head into a sandwich sized ziplock bag just to prove to me how mad she was - if that tells you anything about how awful it went

This is the final, and most successful round of pictures - mostly because we chose a better time and went back to everyone's favorite, the big swing.  But I do feel that I need to be completely honest about the situation.  Before we ever got started, I was going to give the kids a big push so Aaron could take some fun shots and...................................

But finally, FINALLY we got a half decent shot and decided to stop while we were ahead.  No one had tried to suffocate themselves yet that day.  So even though many of you will get this in the mail some time between now and Christmas (probably a whole day or two beforehand) and even though I cropped and edited it and now Super G has a weird shadow on his leg that kind of makes it look like he wet his pants (I promise he did not.  I would have blogged about it.), here it is in all of it's glory. 

    Tonight I was going to go to bed at a decent hour.  I really was.  I had already suffered a mild come apart this evening due to some circumstances involving some turkey feather Christmas ornaments, a jug of V-8 juice, and a bathtub.  Typical Wednesday.  So I was hard-core dedicated to the idea of going to sleep early.  Until I realized that everyone in this house was already asleep and I really wanted to blog.  So that's what I'm doing - except I started working on this joker two hours ago.  I was going to put a whole bunch of photos on here for your viewing pleasure, but because I have issues with focusing on a task, as soon as I started going through the photos on my camera I found myself obsessed with deleting pictures off of my memory card.  The thing that I love about our camera (it's an SLR which means it's digital but clicks really fast) is that it's so quick at taking pictures.  The thing I hate about it is that we go outside to take a couple of family photos, and it clicks so fast that before I know it I have 37 different shots of the same pose to sort through and delete.  And while I love all the choices, it fills the card up with 1,000 pics extra fast. (at least for someone like me who never downloads anything)

    I'm not done deleting yet but my eyes are starting to cross and I'm scared they are going to stick that way so I just quit.  And of course I didn't even get to the pictures that I wanted to put on here, so instead I thought I would share these three that I thought were funny.  At least to me.  Which is not saying much.  I still chuckle occasionally at body function humor.