If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, A School Picture is Worth 2, "Parental Guilt"!

 Pictures are time stamps of our lives. When we look at pictures our brains remind us of events, places or people. They are what we rely on when our brains forget the images we once admired. I am a huge fan of pictures, respect their importance and have devoted a ridiculous amount of space to them on my Mac. All in all, they are to me what words are to poets, what notes are to musicians and what finger- paints are to children. 
When a good friend recently pointed out an interesting frustration she had with school pictures it got me to thinking about this particular genre of photographs and the hilarity of the weight these pix carry for parents.
 Images of kids with jelly stained mouths, post gym/ recess hair don’ts and children whose parents simply forgot it was picture day must have the school photographer wanting to, ”Say cheesy” as he shutters from behind the lens. He probably is thinking, ”Retake, retake, retake. See you in a month kid.” Which is why I can’t understand why we, parents, take this with our children sitting down.
 If you have more than one child you are bombarded with multiple photo forms in September and if you live in my town and have children in different schools they are from different companies. The annoying part, aside form the obvious, is that in the fine print on one of them it says that if you have 3 kids having pictures taken you are eligible for one package at ½ price. That would be great if all of your kids were having their picture taken by the same company.
 So here you are, your hand is cramped from filling out the same emergency information on athletic forms, music forms or health office forms, you are running out of ink and patience and you wonder if your girlfriend even knows you have listed her as your go to mom if you can’t be reached. Statistically between her 3 kids, your 4, whomever else used her as their emergency contact and the fact that you forget to turn up the volume on your cell phone’s ringer daily, there’s  a pretty good chance she’s getting called a couple of times this year. You are just about done with your ”homework” when the photo forms emerge from the backpacks.  
 You look at the first one and you scan for a basic package, at 8 o’clock at night you want simple. Maybe 1 8x10, a couple of 5x7s for grandparents, a few wallets, trying to keep it cheap while fulfilling your parental obligation to purchase pictures that you don’t really want and probably wont like.  You rely on your high school SAT prep classes where you learned how to read questions with answers like: A , B&C ,   All of the above except D, and dive into your choices. BEST BUY, SCHOOL SPECIAL, FAMILY DELUXE, TOP OF THE LINE- each with it’s subcategories of ; with or without blemishes, with or without basic retouching, with or without your kid, You are dizzy looking at the 54 choices you have only to become more confused by the magnets, key chains, magazine covers you can add on to the order you don’t even want. 
 Your calculator starts to smoke as you put in the numbers for the photo shoots your children will be taking part of at school and you reach for your camera and think about the blue paint on your bedroom wall acting as the perfect backdrop for this years school picture.  You put your camera down, write the checks, lick the envelopes and place them in your children’s back packs.
  In the end we can’t bow out, somehow we feel obligated to purchase something. The thought of our child walking up for their photo op without an envelope make us shutter and while we may not love the picture they come home with, we love the subject matter, jelly faced and all.