Picture Day!

This could be any day at my house as the kids are always doing something cute and funny....but I don't take as many pictures as I could or prbably should because you all know what happens when they see the camera....yea, you get the silly faces and then all the spontaneity leaves and it just isn't the same. Something that I really like and will continue to do, I learned from my mother. (Aren't mothers awesome like that?) My mother had (still does) an 8x10 frame for each of us children. They have always been in a prominent place in the house so everyone can see them. Each year when the schools had school pictures she would make sure that we each had our picture taken and we would fill those frames. I always remember the day when it was time to change those pictures. Mom would take down the frames and we would start with the oldest. We would take out all the pictures (at one time she kept all the older pictures in the frames too) and we would lay them out on the table. Then we could see the person as they grew older and changed from year to year. Then Mom realized that they frames wouldn't hold all the pictures and they were starting to stick to each other....so she moved to having all the older pictures in a binder in page protectors and just the new one in the frame. She did this every year until our senior year. This is when the pattern changed. She then had our senior picture there (and it is still there). We bought an extra tassel when we got our graduation stuff and now as you walk down the hall in her house.....all you see are senior pictures with the tassel from the year that we graduated.

So as my kids have been getting older and such I have been keeping up the tradition. I had a slow start with Amanda, as she is the oldest and I didn't take her to the schools for pictures as there was no one to send them home with. But we do have a few of her in her younger years. Wyatt was a different story, and so have the rest of the kids. I remember one year calling the school and asking if they did preschool pictures before the school kids got theirs and them telling me that they didn't think that any of their school age kids had preschool brothers/sisters! I had one year that I brought in my kids (I think I had 3 at the time for preschool pictures) and the photographer asked me if I wanted to do all the kids in one picture.....um, I don't think so because that would defeat the purpose of my trip (although it would have saved me some $$).

I must realize that after this year a couple of things are going to change. First is that next year will be Amanda's last picture....she will be a senior next year!!! And the second is that as soon as this baby is born, I am going to have to find another place to put their pictures. Right now they are all sitting across the top of our entertainment center in our family room....I guess all but Amanda's as hers got knocked off and the glass broken and I haven't replaced it yet. But there is only room for 7 and we will have 8 soon.

But, back to the point of this post today was picture day, at least for one school. That has been another nice thing.....all the schools (and I have kids in 4 different schools this year) have had their picture days on different days and spread out enough that it hasn't messed too much with our budget. Hooray for that!!! Today happened to be Jacob's schools turn. I took Katherine and James and Jacob (he didn't have to ride the bus and the other kids were a bit mad). We went and had the pictures done. Now, with everything going digital I actually got to preview Katherine and James' pictures. Katherine of course was great, and had a wonderful smile. James, on the other hand.....serious as can be. We tried to get a smile, but I am okay with what we got, as the photographer was a stranger, what more could I ask. When we got home, I decided that this was one time when I wanted to do some of my own and pulled out the camera. And sure enough I got the silly faces and the lack of spontaneity. But I did get something that the photographer didn't get out of James....a smile!