School Photos

It was "picture day" a few weeks ago at school. Will's pictures were great last year. He wore a long sleeved blue button down shirt and we picked the blue background. They looked beautiful. I'm usually a creature of habit and don't like to mess with something that works for me. I ALMOST picked the blue background again this year. But we'd dressed Will in this cute little zip sweater that had just a touch of orange and green on it. I decided to go with the flow and pick the green background this year. Unfortunately we didn't plan ahead for picture day so underneath his cute little zip sweater he was wearing a bright orange NORTHEAST SOCCER
T-shirt because we didn't have any clean white ones. The orange barely showed behind the zipper and actually looked okay underneath the sweater. I figured the pictures would probably turn out just fine. We sent him to school.

He came home from school and told us about how he had to take off his sweater because, "The lady told all the kids to take off their jackets." The horror. I couldn't bear to think about what those photos would look like with his bright orange T-shirt and bright green background. I knew immediately that we'd be doing retakes.

Then we got the photos and besides the unintentional Halloween theme - they also had the 2009-2010 year written on them. I'd intentionally not checked that box. I didn't want writing on my photos yet home they came with some stamped with the date and some without the date. But his smile was sort of cute. The pictures were sort of endearing in a "this is a really bad photo of me mostly because I'm too young to know that I shouldn't take off my picture day outfit plus I was being such a good listener for the lady who said to take our jackets off."

So then I wasn't sure. Hmmm. Retakes or not? What kind of mother am I? How picky am I going to be about this? Do I really need to make him have retakes? We ordered a LARGE package thinking all the grandparents and relatives could frame their photos (retakes)...we'll have this photo forever with his Kindergarten through 12th grade photos (retakes)...but this one is kind of cute just the way it is (no retakes)...but his hair is so long (retakes)...but he is a NE kid (no retakes)...but the picture is so shocking to the eyes with those bright orange and green colors (retakes)...but look at that gentle smile (no retakes)...

I like to keep all my options open so we got his haircut last night (the night before retakes) so we'd be ready even though we were leaning towards just keeping the bad photos. Will ended up NOT having retakes. He's been home with a cough so didn't go to school. Decision made for us. This means we'll be sharing his photo with everyone and they can frame or not frame as they so choose. I'll still frame it.

I smile every time I see it.