Auto & Manual Focus: A Christmas Nightmare

Boy do I feel foolish today, I spent about one hour setting up to shoot Christmas pictures of my grand daughter today, then shooting about 25 pictures "to get the right one" only to find out (realize) that my camera was in manual focus and not auto focus....duh!  What happened??  While I was setting up I checked for my custom white balance, Canon recommends that you focus on your white card, well not a problem however auto focus looks for areas of contrast to make its decision on where to focus and my camera wouldn't focus automatically so I switched to manual focus, focused, took my custom white balance photo, and set my camera properly.  Anyway this beautiful young lady (4 years old) walked around the corner to have her picture taken with all the props that I had set up, AND our wiener dog.  As you might imagine I turned to mush and started firing away.  Needless to say the LCD display on the back of the camera has resolution that is only so good, and I didn't really see the slight out of focus pictures.  Once they were loaded onto my computer I almost started crying, they were beautiful, but out of focus, all 25 of them!  Fortunately I hadn't put my props away and she was still just as beautiful AND cooperative as before.  I set my camera to auto focus and fired away, and managed to get a couple for Christmas Cards.  Lesson learned: slow down, develope a routine, and have fun!