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Archives from 2002-2006

Some standard 7:45 PM chaos in our house:

And I wonder why bedtimes are always such a challenge. Duh.

This Monday was school picture day for the kids and so I dug out the only vaguely presentable button-down shirts they own and hovered nearby at breakfast to repeatedly swab them down before peanut butter made it way onto their collars and I practically transported them to class in hermetically-sealed bubbles, bobbing and weaving with tissues in hand and snatching markers out of their sight and demanding that they be careful with the chocolate milk for the love of god, and of course when I picked them up the teachers were all, oh sorry, pictures have been rescheduled for tomorrow. So all I can say the filthy hobo-children wearing ill-fitting Marvel-themed shirts in Tuesday’s picture would have looked a LOT better if everything had happened when it was supposed to and THAT’S why it’s important to stick to a PLAN, dammit.

Anyway, judge me if you must, but I totally bribed Riley ahead of time and promised him a new Transformer if he would behave for the photo session, because he often gets all weird when a camera looms into view, flapping an exasperated hand and burying his face in a pillow until I feel like a particularly obnoxious paparazzo (“Hey Sandra! Tell us what you think about Jessie’s Nazi-loving trashcooter mistress!”).

It may be that he has some lingering bad memories about traumatic school pictures from the past, too. I’m not sure.

(By the way, all the picture forms now let us choose the backdrop, possibly as a result of mass protest against the Infamous Turtle Theme of 2007.)

I’d forgotten about the promised Transformer but Riley sure as shit didn’t, practically tackling me as soon as he got in the door to announce that not only had he been good for the photographer, he’d helped Dylan be good too, and can we go to the store NOW NOW NOW how about NOW?

So now my kid has a new Bumblebee Transformer which has already had its arm snap off and requires parental intervention at least fifty times per hour to help put the fucking arm back on again because MOM HE NEEDS TO TRANSFORM RIGHT NOW TO HELP OCTOMUS FIGHT MEGATRON and it’ll be a couple weeks before we even see those photos so who knows what he did for the camera? He could have done this:

Or this:

It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. However they turn out, there’s usually an inherent awesomeness to school photos precisely for the fact that they are almost always ridiculous:

Still, I learned an important lesson about bribery: it helps if you tie it to a quantifiable result, because otherwise what you’re really teaching your kid is the art of subterfuge.

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