If your husband is the Branch President...

If your husband is the Branch President, then you know he'll be too busy to take pictures on Easter when your kids are all dressed up in their Easter dresses.

(Actually, it's the week after Easter, since we had General Conference on Easter, so we didn't have regular church...)

(If your husband is the Branch President, you'll have time to sew your girls Easter dresses while your husband is off saving the world at night, too...)

If your husband is too busy to take pictures on Sunday, you'll have a great idea to convince everyone to dress up on a Thursday night for pictures. You'll bribe them with pizza, tell them to get all dressed, and when Dad gets home, he can fling on some church clothes, jump in the picture, and poof! Easy-cheesy. You'll be set for your Christmas cards this year.

Then your husband will call you and tell you he's running 20 minutes late. So you'll put on a movie to keep everyone from doing anything to get their dresses dirty.

Twenty minutes later, your husband will call and tell you his bike has a flat tire. You'll put the baby (and the toddler who didn't want to get left behind) in the car. You'll notice the car seats aren't buckled down because you told your kids to clean out the car earlier in the day, so you'll jump in the other car. Then you'll remember that your husband will have his bike, and it doesn't fit in the other car, so you'll go back to the first car, fix the car seats and finally take off.

Then you'll get stuck in heavy traffic.

When you get to your husband, he'll apologize profusely, and you won't want to make him feel bad about being so late, but he'll notice that you're in your Easter clothes, so the whole story will come spilling out. You'll decide to just go ahead and give the picture a shot, dinner and bedtime regardless.

You'll go into your back yard and find the sun to be at a bad angle for pictures, but if everyone stands in a line in the shade of a tree trunk, everyone looks good. You'll take exactly 3 pictures and pray for the best!

And, you'll be pretty lucky - your hungry, tired kids took pretty good pictures.

I did have a tough dilema, though - should I choose the picture where the kids are all really cute (above) but I look funny, or the one where I look much better, but the kids are all just a little bit worse (below).

Vanity is a tough thing. But I think Sam and Martha are so adorable in the top one, I'll ignore my ear-of-fire. Ok, really, the clincher is Jane looking at the camera for the top one. Gotta love it.

(Argh. I told Ellis and Lillian to undo their top button. Those sneaky girls. They think they look better with the top button done up.)

My favorite thing about these pics is how amazingly linear our heights are right now! You'd think we'd lined up on purpose to accentuate it, not because we were standing in the shade of a tree trunk :)

So, they're not perfect, but do a little cropping, and they'll be fine pictures to remember our Easter by!

My favorite picture from the night was the one I took of just the kids to test the camera out:

Dang, they're cute.