school pictures

Instead of doing regular school pictures this year we decided to take Shailey and Eli into JCPenney's to get pictures taken after our bad experience last year with Shailey's school pictures.

Last year, I had spent a long time doing her hair right before school only to have them comb it their way for the picture. It was in her face, you couldn't see her eyes and I was so frustrated. This year we weren't going to make that mistake again. We wanted to be able to see the pictures right then and there and choose one that we liked. Shailey had a ton of cute pictures and it was hard to decide but ultimately we ended up choosing the first picture.

Eli's experience with the photographer was a bit different. He had a few strikes going against him though. For one, it was a different photographer than the one Shailey had (who, by the way, was awesome!). Two, they were so stubborn about the background that we wanted. We really wanted to use the same brown background that we had used for Shailey--which they had--only it was behind another background that supposedly took them three hours to set up and they were unwilling to move it. They did manage to slide part of it away to reveal about two feet of the brown. So all of Eli's pictures are basically headshots. And three, the poor kid had a little bruise on his forehead. Such is the life of a five year old! I guess I can't complain too much. He's still a pretty cute kid!

We chose the first picture.

(We almost chose the last one but were worried the bruise was more visible...)