Picture day!

Today was picture day at our school. A couple of years ago they started doing this thing, where they have picture day a few weeks before school starts. I think that the school's main reason is that when you go to get your kid's picture taken, you also have to finish any paperwork that hasn't already been completed, and that ensures that the office will have fewer headaches on the first day of school. I like it because i can fix the kids' hair right before the picture is taken, so i don't get pictures back and find that Zane has smashed his hair down into flat bangs and Houston has tucked all his hair behind his ears and Katrina has been running around at recess and now has a head full of tangles.

So this afternoon i carefully fixed all three kids' hair (bemoaning the fact that neither of my boys had been willing to get a haircut recently). I carefully inspected everyone's shirts, making sure that there were no random stains. I made sure faces were washed. And then we drove to school...

...where we had to stop at 6 different tables along the hallway before we got to the pictures. Most of them went quickly, because i HAD done all my paperwork beforehand (although i did have to have the secretary finish one of my forms for me, because when i was filling it out, it all of a sudden closed and was all, "You're finished!" and i was all, "What?! No i'm not!" and it was all, "La la la! I can't hear you! Talk to your school's secretary if you want to fix this!"), but even so, as i was filling out the picture order form, Zane was all, "Houston messed up my hair!" and Houston defended himself with, "Well, Zane was hugging my legs and wouldn't let go!" and i looked at Zane and shook my head at his hair and then looked at Houston and realized that he had a spot of blood RIGHT ON THE FRONT OF HIS SHIRT, in a spot that would absolutely show up in the picture.

Me: "What?! What happened there?! That wasn't there 5 minutes ago!"
Houston: "Huh? Oh! Where'd that come from?"
Me: ".....!!!"
Picture lady: "Do you want to just drive home and come back? Or we could do retakes?"

We finally got into the picture-taking room, and as i was trying to wrangle Zane's hair into a not-mop, i heard the other photographer call, "Um, can you help me? We've got a stain on this shirt!" I was all, "It's not my fault!!! It wasn't there when we left the house!" The kind of wrinkled his shirt to try to hide the spot, so it'll either look great or it'll totally look like they were trying to hide a spot, and we'll have to do re-takes.