Post the Tenth – Easter Fun + Some Advice About Professional Pictures

Dubya has to work the occasional weekend, and as our luck would have it he is scheduled for this weekend. 7:00 am to 7:00 pm Saturday and Sunday. This Sunday (I’m sure you know) is Easter.

It’s not too awful usually. The twelve hour days are certainly more stressful but he gets two weekdays off to sort of make up for it and in the end works only eight hours more that pay period than when he doesn’t work a weekend. The suckiest part is that he gets the Thursday before the weekend and the Friday after the weekend off so he ends up working seven days in a row with the long weekend shifts at the beginning of it so we don’t get to recuperate from the weekend until a week later. The nice part is that when he has the Friday after off he gets a three day weekend.

This weekend, the only difference is that we had to move our Easter celebration to a day he had off. We went ahead and did it yesterday.

It was a really fun day. P1 especially had a blast… getting her Easter basket and hunting for Easter eggs. She also got to dye eggs for the first time.

Infected with severe “mommy brain”, I had also scheduled P2’s 5 month pictures (we do pictures monthly for the first year) for yesterday so that made things more ridiculously chaotic interesting.

We got up, showered, dressed, ate breakfast (well… Dubya and P1 ate breakfast while I did P1’s hair. I do get quite crazy creative with the hair) and went to our first picture appointment.

Why yes, I did say first picture appointment. Here’s your advice:

Many photography studios have an inexpensive package meant to reel you into the studio. This package is often limited to one pose, but you get around 15-32 pictures of the one pose (an 8x10, 2 5x7, 4 3.5x5, 8 or 16 wallets, and sometimes a 10x13 and/or 16 locket-sized pictures).

I have seen the package range from $4.99 - $8.99 at Picture Me Portrait Studio (in Wal-Mart Super Centers) and from $10 - $18 at other studios (Picture Me gives you the least pictures… 1 8x10, 2 5x7, 4 3.5x5, and 8 wallets. Other studios, such as Picture People or studios in JC Penny or Sears to name a few, usually include a 10x13 and often have16 wallets. The locket-sized pictures seem to be disappearing from most studios’ cheap packages but you can find them in the package sometimes).

We have spent $20 on the package once but that was also the one time it was not limited to one pose. Instead we got to get six sheets (a sheet is 1 8x10, 2 5x7, 8 wallets, etc.) in any sizes and any poses we wanted.

These studios will allow you to do this package as often as ONCE A MONTH (works perfectly for us *wink*).

SO… we go to 2 or 3 studios in the same day (so we don’t have to dress/do hair for pictures more than once) and get the super cheap package with maybe a few extra sheets at the per-sheet price and voilà! More pictures for less $.

Also, if you join the studios’ clubs it costs a little up front but you often get a free 8x10 every time you come in or something else that easily makes up for the cost of the membership. At Picture Me we get a free 8x10 every time we go in and either 40% off or unlimited buy one get one free depending on the day (plus you can get a free 10x13 online as a reorder).

So just from Picture me we get the 15 pictures for (on average) $7, 2 or 3 sheets (these are either $10 each but we get 2 of each sheet for that, that’s how they do the buy one get one free… or $6 each if we take 40% off but then we only get one of each sheet), a free 8x10, and a free 10x13 (with $5.99 shipping). That is a lot of pictures from a studio for only $31 or $43. If we bought all of that sheet by sheet it would come out to $100 or $130.

Then we do pretty much the same thing (but usually buy less) at a second and, rarely, third place.

Sorry if that is all confusing. I tried to be as clear as possible.

Anyway, I digress. After the morning pictures we came home and did Easter baskets.

Here is P1’s

P2’s

P2 checking out her basket

Then we had lunch and Dubya took the girls upstairs while I hid eggs. We had 45 eggs to hide so that took a little bit of time. It’s hard to be sure what is hidden, without being too hard to find for a preschooler. Most of the eggs were pretty easy to spot but I tried to make a few fairly challenging, without being too frustrating for her.

Eggs in our back patio area

Eggs in our living room

Eggs in our front yard

Once I got all the eggs hidden Dubya brought the girls down and the hunting commenced.

P1 finding an egg in the front yard

P2 getting an egg off the sidewalk

P1 found an egg in the patio area

I made Dubya take a picture of their egg hunting buckets after they were done. I’d say they got a good haul.

Buckets o’ eggs

After our egg hunting adventures (and after P1 had eaten probably more than a dozen pieces of candy. She kept sneaking it when Mommy and Daddy weren’t looking), we headed back out for our second (and last) picture appointment for the day. Thanks to all the candy you couldn’t even tell P1 had missed her nap in all the craziness and the second appointment went more smoothly than the morning one (I had been afraid it would be a disaster because it was supposed to be 4 hours earlier but then they called and rescheduled it to later in the day, causing us to be unable to have said nap).

We came home, ate dinner and dyed Easter eggs with P1 for the first time.

Pretty eggs. I did the drawing. At almost-three P1 isn’t quite that artistic yet. Not that I am artistic… I’m NOT.

All in all it was a busy but awesome day.

Post the Ninth - New Friends?

 I’m not an introverted person. I’m not extremely outgoing either. It really depends on the situation I suppose but one area in which I tend to be less outgoing is joining in on conversations with people I don’t know.

You know the scenario. You’re in a public place and a couple (or a group) of people strike up a conversation. You overhear and have something to contribute but you don’t know if they will welcome your input or be offended that you were listening.

I am a stay-at-home mom who doesn’t drive. I live in a city FAR from my family and childhood/high school friends. We have lived here for going on 3 years and in that time I have made maybe half a dozen friends, most of whom have moved away or are about to move away. Later this month I will be down to one person that isn’t my husband or my girls that I really get to spend time with. It’s quite rare that I get to have a conversation that doesn’t involve Scooby Doo.

Understandably I go a little crazy at times.

At the Easter event at Dubya’s work, while we were standing in line waiting to get P1’s face painted, there were three women in front of us talking about the Easter egg hunt. P1 was in the 0-2 year category (I would have put her in 3-5 but Dubya signed her up). The way the 0-2 hunt works, they set up a big, open area with eggs just scattered all over the ground in plain view. Since the kids are so young the parents walk with them as they pick up eggs. It is easy to understand why the parents go with them. Some of the children can’t even walk and the ones who can might get knocked down or lost in the group of adults with the kids who can’t. So yes, even our almost-3-year-old P1 was accompanied by her Daddy.

While it is understandable that the parents accompany their babies and toddlers, it also presents some problems:

• The company Dubya works for is very large. There are a LOT of people who turn up for the family events at Easter, Halloween and Christmas time. There are a lot of families with children in the 0-2 year range… So there are a lot of kids and a lot of parents participating in the egg hunt. This means that any one child (and parent) has a sea of other children and their parents to try to fight through to get any eggs. If you aren’t at the front of the group, by the time you get to a place that had eggs it has been picked clean.

• Parents get competitive and selfish. Parents not only do not limit the number of eggs they will allow their children to collect, but many even encourage their children to get more eggs than they should. (Last year, when I went into the fray with P1, we even had a parent urging their child to snatch an egg that P1 was reaching for right out from under her nose. I had to tell the child, “No. She was trying to pick that egg up. Let her get it please.”) Our rule is that P1 may get no more than 4 eggs (this year Dubya had trouble even helping her get that many, it was so bad). The reasons we do this are that she will get to go to other egg hunts (just this year there are four… one at Dubya’s work, one at Sam’s Club, one at home, one at church), we want to try to limit how much candy she has, and we want to teach her consideration for the other children and make sure everyone gets some of the eggs.As I stood waiting for Dubya and P1 (who were still struggling to get even a second egg), two children and their parents walked over next to me. One child’s bucket was filled to the brim with colorful plastic eggs (at least a dozen, likely more). The other child’s mother was bragging to the mother of the first “He got TEN eggs!” The child was barely old enough to walk and certainly was unlikely to have gotten ten eggs without a lot of encouragement (I remember when P1 was that age she would get one or two eggs and then was more interested in opening them than getting more). If there were 100 children participating in the egg hunt, at 10 eggs each the company would have to provide 1,000 candy filled eggs JUST for the 0-2 age group. They also do 3-5 and 6-10 age groups.P1 finished the hunt with four eggs, two or three of which she got because a volunteer running the egg hunt dropped them near her after most of the other kids were gone. At least the people running the event try to remedy the issue by giving eggs to the children who get bullied and ignored by greedy parents.

The women in front of us were talking about their kids experiences with the 0-2 egg hunt. They were talking about how many people there were and how few eggs their children were able to get. I thought about jumping in with the point about limiting the number of eggs we allowed our daughter to get and how much better it would be if the company tried to encourage parents to stick to a set number but wasn’t sure if I should.

I finally jumped in and the four of us had a lovely conversation (and no one even mentioned  Scooby!). I found out that all three of the other women were stay-at-home moms as well and that they all wanted more adult interaction. I must have been feeling especially brave because I suggested that we all get together for some play dates (or as I think of them, mom dates). We all exchanged phone numbers and hopefully will be getting together sometime soon.

Looks like stepping outside my comfort zone might have paid off. One thing is for sure… Even if none of these ladies actually follows through with any plans to get together, I’ve promised myself to put myself out there more in the hopes that I can have some mommy friends. After all… If I offend someone by trying to join the conversation I’ll likely never see them again anyway

BUT

If I join in and we hit it off, I just might.