Snap Shots

So, sometime around April, or whatever month Easter happens to fall in, was it March this year? Crap, I don’t know and it’s completely unimportant. Sometime at the beginning of the year I had this bright idea that I was going to buy the kids Easter outfits and take them to have professional photos shot. At Kiddie Kandids. Calling Kiddie Kandids professional photography doesn’t sound right, but you pay a decent (I mean large) sum to have your kids photos taken by someone probably much, much younger than myself, who works part time, in a mall. So, I guess it’s professional, but not really. Anyway! I had that idea, so I bought the Easter outfits. Guess where they are? In the closet, tags still on. Including the baby’s dress which is a size 6-9 months. Guess how old little princess will be on Tuesday? That’s right, 9 months.

I’m giving up this little dream of professional pictures. I have procrastinated and procrastinated to a point that all the clothes I’ve bought are probably too small for any of them to wear. My solution is to take my own damn photos. Go ahead. Judge me. I’m a horrible person. Not only did I not take them as planned, but I have never had Jillian’s photos taken. Not once have I dressed her in one of her many cute outfits and headed to the mall so that strangers could wave silly toys in her face. I think it has something to do with my fear of her screaming, because there are strangers waving silly toys in her face. That and the fact that all the photos I have of the kids, including baby, are better than any photos they have had taken at the mall or school.

Even the ones we have framed and hanging up are perfectly sweet and perfectly them. Meaning, it’s as if you can see their personalities looking back at you. And I don’t want to buy pictures of my kids in some goofy pose with a background of trees or the sea shore behind them. It just seems silly. And yes, the props and poses are cute, but I think they’re cute without them. Maybe I’m making excuses to not get them dressed up to go to the mall, which is 30-40 minutes from our house and wait in line, did I mention we would have to go the mall? Wait in line at the mall for God knows how many hours so that the baby can cry and be frightened. I don’t want to do it. And I can’t afford to have them all shot at a professional studio where they schedule a time for you to come in and take photos of them in goofy poses with real backgrounds of trees and I’m sure the sea shore, but we don’t have a sea shore.

So, I won’t. And I will do my best to pose them goofy and put them in front of trees and maybe a fence or something. Or we could go on location-to a park. Because honestly with the money it would cost to gas up the car and take them to the mall (did I mention we would have to go to the mall?) where we will probably have to eat a little snack while waiting and then pay for the many packages of pictures, I could probably buy them a new outfit, new shoes, and have their hair done. And then I would end up taking a million pics of them anyway. And these pictures would be neatly filed away on the computer, so neatly that at the drop of a hat I would be able to find these photos, save them to a disk and get them printed in various sizes at the local Fred Meyer for practically nothing instead of thrown in a cupboard with a million other pictures waiting to be put in a photo album. Which will never happen.