Picture this

Wednesday is spring picture day at the youngest girl's school. Yes, Spring pictures because apparently one school picture is no longer enough and we need to have them in the fall and in the spring. She is bummed because she has a scratch on her nose. She has no idea how she got the scratch and swears she had absolutely nothing to do with it. She's very worried it will show up in the photo and now the six-year-old believes makeup should be applied to hide the blemish. I told her not to worry because I most likely won't buy the (ridiculously expensive) picture anyway. The reason? Meadows, pastures, woods, an ocean bluff. No, these aren't places that I'm dreaming of visiting - these are the backgrounds from which my child gets to choose for her school picture. I'm serious. They have the kid sitting there with one knee up and her chin in her hand. Because isn't that all how we look when we're sitting on a cliff overlooking the Pacific? Or the one with the boy sitting in the meadow with his chin in his hand. Really? What boy is going to pick this background? Whatever happened to blue? Just plain old blue? Bad enough I have to worry about the outfit and the hair on the same morning the older one has to be to school on time (which for me means early) to take state tests. Great. Good luck with that. Oh, yeah, the outfit is supposed to match the background we choose. What? Can you just give me a white background? Or black? Everything goes with black. Oh, and wait, what if the tall one chooses a different background than her little sister? What then? Now I have two pictures with two stupid backgrounds! Oh how I now feel so bad for my mom. We used to make her put our hair in curlers the night before pictures. Don't ask me why - it always came out horribly. I have to admit, I have bad hair in nearly every school picture I've ever taken. The curlers, the self-cutting of the bangs, the letting my BFF Chrissy perm my hair the night before and then her taking a phone call and leaving it on so long that I looked like Jermaine Jackson. Oh, and the outfits. A blessing of Catholic school is that you wear uniforms for most pictures, but we also had the times where we got to wear casual clothes. So, I have photos with a pale green polyester vest that had something to do with backgammon. Then there's one with a pale green, ruffled turtleneck with orange cats in a pattern that make some of them upside down. Oh and the famous ankle length dress that both my sister and I wore one year. Not pretty. Maybe I should send my girls to school in overalls - those will match pretty much any grassy-themed picture, right?