The story of how I tried to take cute pictures of Annika on a winter day when the sun finally came out

So the story starts one day last week after an extremely cold and gray day, the sun decides to come out and warm everything up, and it is almost time to go pick Ariel up from school, and Annika is looking so cute in her favorite outfit, and the sky is finally blue, and we have a few moments, so I venture to take a cute picture of her. I just wanted one. Really.
The night before after dance we had hastily built this pathetic snowman, just to check it off our list of winter activities, but hadn't had time to put a nose on it, so I thought it would be cute to get a picture of Annika putting a nose on, only she wanted to use the small kind of carrots...for eyes, oh, and I didn't realize until later that the sun was behind me casting my shadow right on her, and ruining the otherwise cute picture.
So I tried from the other side, but then the car was in the picture....so I gave up on the snowman, the eyes weren't sticking anyway because overnight everything got coated in a thin layer of ice.
And I tried to get her to look up and smile at the same time, which is really hard for her.




So, she looks at the camera, smiling, but the wind blows her hair in her face.



We move into the sunshine and the lighting looks great, but she wants to stand all goofy and won't open her eyes, maybe its the sun. Did I mention that we were in such a rush to get out and take theses pictures before getting in the car that I just took her ponytail out and didn't bother to part her hair nicely. Poor neglected child.

At one point she tried to walk away from the whole ordeal. But then it was time to go get Ariel from school.
And Ariel thought she would teach her a thing or two about posing for the camera.





I got to the point where I set the camera to just keep taking pictures while I pushed the button hoping that I might catch her looking up, and I unconsciously kept taking pictures while I was trying to set her hair straight and I actually really like how this one turned out and how you can see my motherly fingers, brushing her hair back.

Here she is trying really hard to smile really cute.....but she just can't seem to open her eyes.

Finally she decided to look at the camera, and the light was good, but she had to give me this, "Ok, Mom, if I really have to here is a smile for you" look. And she bent forward all goofy. So that is the story of how I tried to capture the beauty of my third daughter on one winter day when the sun finally came out.