picture day

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Today's picture day at my son's school and I actually did it: I sent him to class without his picture form and check. And, I did it on purpose. I can hear the audible gasp from parents everywhere. Why would I do something like that? Well, for several reasons.

First, we don't have all that many people to give the portraits to. The school picture package is great if you have a huge family with which to share portraits, but we don't. At least, we don't just randomly send them school pictures in the mail.

Second, the package that we normally purchase used to be $17 and we got a couple of 5x7s and maybe a couple of wallets. When I looked at the price list this year, it was going to be a minimum of $30 to purchase any package that contained anything of a frame-able size. Sorry, but that's too much.

That leads me to my third reason. Parents are required to pay for the portraits sight-unseen. We just send in a check and pray that the picture will turn out half-way decent. We can only hope that the photographer will take more than 30 seconds to plop each student in front of an ugly blue screen, point, and shoot.

Also, the past few years we've gone to a portrait studio for professional Christmas pictures. It might just be a mall studio, but the photographer actually takes the time to work with each client. I am much more pleased with the portraits that we purchase, though we obviously spend more than Lifetouch charges for sit-and-shoot school portraits.

Though I have all these great reasons as to why we shouldn't buy school portraits this time (not even to mention that now they take them in the fall and again in the spring), I feel a bit guilty for sending Alex in without his form. I don't want him to think that we don't love him enough to buy his portraits. Obviously, we do. We just don't want to be strong-armed into buying something of lesser quality.