It was time to work on the Blair Family Christmas Card 2009, so we headed down to sweet little Camas and watched the tree lighting, had a nice Thai dinner at Kop Chair and shot our card in the studio with complete cooperation of the fam (they know this shoot is important and complaining is tres’ taboo). PH was an excellent sport while he stood for a long while completely wrapped in Christmas lights. I’m not posting it here because I want to send the card out first (it turned out so great!).
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If you would like to receive our holiday masterpiece via snail mail (and I would be thrilled to send it to you!), please comment or email me your address (lara@larablairimages.com).
I will, however, post a couple of snaps of the girls and me and Dave’s horror that his 9 year-old is so close to his height while standing on a small ladder…
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PH and I have a tradition of going to this fantastic diner called the Country Cafe out here in the sticks. Anytime you’ve got guys in Carharts suits and flannel shirts sitting at the breakfast bar, you know you’re in for a good time. We relish our time there (and the mediocre coffee..cup after cup) and don’t want to vacate our booth we call home for an hour or so. It’s our catch-up time (esp. when he is a traveling man for the rest of the week) and also just a chance to be “a local”. We took the girls last Saturday and to our surprise it was packed–we had to wait for 15 minutes! Totally worth it. On the way on this very unseasonably frigid morning (20 degrees) Dave capture “Horses in the Mist” (he says this with a silly art-critic face that makes me laugh).
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The girls enjoying the Country Cafe’ ambiance..of which there is plenty.

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Onward to staff pics that were taken this week.
As you’ve heard me yammering about it, we’re moving the whole darn thing to a new location on Monday and have been in the process for weeks….
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…which totally stinks, btw.
…have I mentioned that I dislike this process?
Anyway, a sure-fire way to get a couple of funnies out of this horrific experience is to do a photoshoot of us re-enacting our moving mess.
Yes, making moving lemonade out of these lemons…and adding plenty of sugar!
My pal & local celebrity, Krista Colvin (super fab…visit here), took these images and I added artwork later.
Makes me laugh…
…and then cry b/c I think about how those boxes need to have stuff in them and go out the door!
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If you’re on our LBI holiday card list (email if you’d like to be), you’ll see the whole “moving collage shebang”.
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Every year the gals and I get some recent headshots of each other (can’t help but laugh at the ridiculous amounts of haird0s I’ve had in just three short years).
Mary is below (many of you know her as the voice of LBI)…my rock, my ever-sweet-no-matter-what-the-situation-no-matter-how-demanding-the-client Mary. She supplies endless amounts of cheerleading and encouragement in all that I do. Mom to two boys who think she is the bee’s knees. She’s so lovely, isn’t she?
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Sunny, the “get-er-done” gal at LBI, came on board this year and Mary and I marvel at what a great trio we make together. She is a quick-study in the best possible way with digital editing, framing, packaging, display hanging, etc, etc…she takes whatever crazy task I ask of her and does it with excellence. So glad we found this missing piece to our studio puzzle. She would laugh, but I dare say Sunny is a beautiful feminine woman who happens to live with four men (mom of three boys who love her to pieces)…proof of that is the ultra-fun session we had in the mud in the fall.
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As for me, I’m still getting used to the curls…they’re such a pain in the tuckus to get right when the weather is so dry! Weird, weird climate these past few days. It’s good for me to sit for a portrait to see what torture it is for some of my clients…hard not to laugh…hard not to feel cheezy…hard not want to grab the camera after each image to see if I look silly or have lipstick on my teeth. We laughed a lot during this session and I dare say we had a good time.
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Have a great weekend, friends!
Lara