Well, yesterday was school picture day for Carson.

Oh, I remember picture day.  You woke up that morning with so much hope for the day....your outfit all laid out, the perfect hairstyle in your mind, and visions of your school picture being so incredibly perfect that the company would ask for permission to use it in their advertisements.  It was going to be a great day!     

After all, school pictures were, oh, so important.  I mean, for the next year, it would be the image that everyone would see when they looked you up in the yearbook.  It was the picture that would sit on your parents' desks at work....the one that their clients would pick up and look at while they waited.  It's the picture that would stay in your Grandma's purse in that plastic picture sleeve that came with her wallet.  She'd be pulling that thing out at bridge, Sunday school, and potluck dinners......any time she'd get the chance.  For the next year, it would be held up on your Nana's Frigidaire by her Smoky Mountains bear magnet.  They'd be cut apart and passed out to your best buds with "Friends 4-Ever" and maybe a heart written on the back.  Clearly, school pictures were not something you entered into lightly.  You had one chance to do this thing right. 

I, myself, made some tragic school pictures, especially in the jr high years.  Despite all of your visions of splendor, picture day would invariably go something like this…..It would be a stormy day...the kind that would bring Jim Cantore to town or either the most hot and humid day ever recorded since the late 1800's....both of which made for hair problems.  As you stood in front of the bathroom mirror that morning, you became frantic, watching the minutes tick away as your hair was looking nothing like you'd imagined it the night before.  You were convinced that the portrait company must somehow be privy to your cycle calendar because they always seemed to come to your school during your "sensitive" week and that makeup just wasn't covering the hormonally based golf ball zit on your chin.  You'd get to school and wait and wait and wait for the pictures to start.  Without fail, the office would finally call your class over the loud speaker after lunch.....spaghetti day, of course....which was just after trampoline fundamentals in PE and the hands on study of static electricity in science.....and then when you finally took your seat in front of that blue marbled screen, the photographer would tilt your head so that his ginormous lights would reflect off of your oily chin and then snap the picture right when your lips were curled from being forced to say “I love boys”.
 
Heaven forbid your mom didn't send the envelope back with a check in it, because the photographer sure wouldn't be taking up any time with you then.  He was done before you even sat down on that stool good.  And if she did go out on a limb and prepay for Package C and they turned out to be hideous, you were doomed for the whole next calendar year....looking like an utter fool on refrigerators, bridge tables, and bulletin boards all over town. 

Hopefully, Carson's first high school picture will be somewhat flattering.  No matter what it looks like, it will be a noticeable improvement over his mother's.  That is all we can hope for as parents, isn't it?  That our children’s school pictures will be better than ours were.