Picture Day Mayhem

As we gear up for the beginning of school, I am prepping myself for the first big milestone of the school year. Picture day. Yes siree, I know on picture day two things are SURE to happen:

1) Exactly one day prior, a child will lose a tooth and/or get a bad haircut, thereby making them look like they have just stumbled in from a bar fight. (Fortunately, and I kid you not, our school photographer now offers “retouching” for a $10 fee.)

2) I will forget it’s picture day. Write it on the calendar, read the reminder notes from school, tie a string around every finger—and I will still forget.

Now this second inevitability has several ripple effects… Since I will have forgotten picture day, I will also have forgotten to do laundry. This means my children will have to go to school in grocery bags, leaving our outfit choices at paper or plastic.

I will, of course, have also forgotten to order more checks. (Those of you you who have not yet entered the delightful realm of school pictures may not yet know that you actually have to pay in advance. They do this because they know that if your child looks like he or she just got into a bar fight, chances are, you won’t want to buy the photos—no matter how much time and effort they just spent getting the darn shot.)

So with ONE check in my checkbook I will be faced with the Sophie’s Choice of school pictures. You see, I’m not willing to write down my credit card number on the order form. Not that I don’t trust people—but if I was a photog’s assistant and had just spent 12 hours convincing runny-nosed kids to sit still and smile for a measly $8.50 an hour, those card digits would be lookin’ pretty good to me.

Yet, as all things somehow do, picture day always ends up working out in the end. I’ll get out my pitchfork and dig up two respectable outfits from the laundry pile, forge my husband’s signature on a couple of his checks, and bike my kids to school where they will run to join the rest of the impeccably groomed children getting filthy on the playground.

And we’ll have photographic memories of these golden times to cherish forever.