Picture Day

Today we went with the cousins to get a group picture. I felt a little like big D's expression in the picture above. This year we decided we were going to go to JcPennys because the price was good .You can sit on the floor and don't have those mechanical changing backdrops that scare the kids. Another reason was there camera is handheld so its not like another huge thing the kids get afraid of. We walk in and the lady there was really nice there was no other people waiting. I was thinking this is going to be great! So we go into the picture taking room and Baby G and Baby T (cousin, same age as Baby G) are scared and crying. Wouldn't sit. Nothing. The lady taking our pictures was kind enough to stay out of there way until they warmed up to the place. Finally they started to feel comfortable in there and were acting so cute and then all of a sudden.....her shift ended (what? right in the middle of our session!)...yep that's right, she just all of a sudden went and grabbed someone else and LEFT!!! After we spent 20 minutes or so getting these two warmed up, while the other 3 were waiting so patiently.When all of a sudden some other lady comes in and takes over, not even knowing how long it took us to get these sweet little ones HAPPY!!! It then takes another 20 minutes to even get them to the center of the floor to try and take a somewhat decent of a picture. She then finally snaps a shot of them and says..."OK, I am done! I got ONE finally of them all looking" OK, so we are like alright...she did take some others...she seems pretty confident that the last one looks great.....so I guess we're done? So we load everyone up to go look at the photos. We are waiting........waiting.....waiting. When finally she comes and shows us our pictures. We are looking them over between two computers. I did not understand why, but they finally fixed the problem after I had to get a little bit snappy and the lady that tried to blame the problem on who ever I called and set the apt. with. "I spoke with someone that works here. They should have known how to make our apt. right??" She gets all huffy and puffy. I said "all we want is some of those pics over on the other computer, so we can make our own group picture." She, tried to tell me that will just not work, but that she will try....oooo I was so flustered by this point. We had screaming babies. Hot and sweaty mamas. Luckily, the older two were happily engaged in watching American Tales. Thank heavens for T.V.'s in times like these. It ended up taking allot longer then we had expected. But over all. The pictures turned out nice. I always seem to get grumpy at these picture places. I have come to realize this:

If your going to go to places that don't have real professional photographers you need to tell them every detail that you want.

You need to tell them "hey take the picture, there's a good one right there"

you need to tell them exactly what you want them to do.

tell them all the poses you want

What color you want your back drop

tell them that you want an apt. that's not during shift change.

tell them to stop talking in a loud voice cause your making them cry.

OK so next time, I think maybe I am just going to take the pictures. ( Great thought huh!)

We did however end up having a better experience then last year. So that's a plus. We also did end up with some pretty good shots of the kiddos. Grandma was happy. We were happy. In the end it did turn out great. We now know how to better prepare ourselves for next time.

I am overall happy. And most of all thankful. Thankful for my Mom. She is the one that bought them there cute outfits and bought the pictures. Thank you!