Our school does school pictures twice a year. The procedure for fall pictures is slightly different than the procedure for spring pictures. In the fall, they assume competence. It’s still early in the school year. The kids have some decent new clothes that fit. Some parents are still on top of checking the homework folder and the agenda and reading the school’s 17 billion weekly emails. So in the fall, they send home the notice. They send you a form to complete and send back with your check for exorbitantly priced photos. A bunch of kids come to school dressed nicely, with their hair combed. Kids bring in a little envelope and a check. It’s all very organized.
In the spring, the photo companies assume (correctly) that the parents are burnt out… so this round plays on parental guilt. I assume a notice is still sent home, but the expectation isn’t that you order ahead of time. Instead, they take the photos, print them out, and send them home with your kid. And they don’t just send photos. They send magnets and weird ID cards and photo key chains and all kinds of crap that nobody wants. In these photos, your kid is probably wearing a hand-me-down Mickey Mouse t-shirt that doesn’t quite fit right, and he desperately needs a haircut. At this point, you have two options. You can send the photos back, so these heartless bastards can needlessly shred expensive portraits of your special little cupcake (this option also includes endless whining from said cupcake about how s/he NEEDS a weird photo ID card or cheap keychain of their own face). Or, you can send these scheming asshats another exorbitant check and add these photos to the pile of papers on the kitchen table (with every intention of at least framing one and sending a few off to the grandparents) only to find them still there in the envelope eight months later when you finally get around to going through that particular pile of crap.
I should admit that my response to school pictures has evolved over the years. When my first was young, I was all over school pictures. We had a nice outfit. I filled out the form and sent in my check and reminded my little nugget to smile nicely. Some of these early photos were cute. Others were less so. But I felt confident in my ability to handle this school picture thing. The first time I forgot school picture day, my oldest was in third grade. That’s not an awful record, right? Except my youngest was in Kindergarten. How could I possibly forget about his KINDERGARTEN school photo? I left work on my lunch break to bring in the form and my check to make sure that my precious pumpkin got to bring home some photos. I felt like a failure. But I quickly grew accustomed to it. In subsequent years, when I realized I had forgotten yet again, I’d reason, “They’ll send me photos in the spring. I’ll just wait for that.”
But this year, something changed. I now have a teenaged girl. This young lady is gorgeous. She’s crazy beautiful. And she hates having her picture taken. She covers her face. She hides. She yells and cries if she thinks I’ve snuck a picture of her. So now, the school picture has become infinitely more valuable. And I decided to do something differently.
I put the date in my smartphone calendar. And this brilliant little computer dinged to tell me that today was picture day, and when I realized that I was out of checks and couldn’t find the form, I looked back in my email for a link where I could enter my credit card number. You guys, I REMEMBERED school picture day. Isn’t there some kind of parenting award for that?