Conlee Family Pictures – What not to do
Photos © www.abideinhimphotography.com
For the last three falls, the Conlees have had one or both children in braces. With four sets of pearly whites showing this year, we were finally ready for a family picture that could happily hang on a wall. We hired a great photographer and friend, Robyn Smith, and this past weekend was the scheduled shoot. The end results are fantastic, but for all of you who are still preparing to take that picture for your family Christmas card, let me tell you four things not to do before the photo shoot…
1. Don’t schedule a haircut the day of.It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, but due to unforeseen circumstances, the basketball coach scheduled a practice in the middle of our original hair appointment. We had already rescheduled pictures twice. By the time it was all said and done, the best we could do was leave church and head to a 12:30pm and 1:30pm haircut for the guys, with a photo session starting at 2:30pm.
2. Don’t ask for opinions.Finding clothes that all four people like that also coordinate in color is much more challenging than the days of pulling out the matching smocked outfits and forcing little ones to get dressed. I thought I was ahead of the game by giving my teenage daughter first choice on what she wore. I just didn’t account for the fact that the hour before the pictures, she would decide that she couldn’t possibly wear the pants that she had previously picked out.
3. Don’t lay out the clothes.We had been out of town the week prior to picture day. I thought I was so well prepared as I had everyone’s clothing selected the week before we left. I even put them off limits in a seldom-used closet so the clothes would be ready to go when we returned. One piece of clothing was a birthday gift my son had ordered with a gift card the week before. I bribed him not to wear the new sweater until picture day. Great idea… until he put it on for the first time after his haircut at 2:15pm and decided he hated it and refused to be photographed in it.
4. Don’t skimp on make-up.I’m not a real connoisseur of make-up. I put foundation on a dozen times a year at the most. I thought it would be appropriate to have family picture day be one of those occasions. Just a week earlier, I had been in Sephora replacing my daughter’s lost foundation. I walked in the store knowing that I had been out of blush for a month and was perilously low on mascara. Yet a free gift ended up providing a little sample of both blush and mascara. Score! Left poor from the foundation purchase, this was such a happy moment for this budget-conscious mother. What I forgot was how much it helps to have a brush to apply both blush and powder.
Scurrying around to make sure the other three Conlees were ready, I was left doing my own make-up very late in the proceedings. Noticing a shine from the foundation I never use, I decided to put on a little powder. The only problem was that the equally seldom-used powder was missing its little protective guard. Ten minutes before departure, I opened the powder container to have all the loose powder pour on my hand. Trying to keep from making a mess, I used my hand to try to get the loose powder back in its container. This, too, would’ve been fine if I had not simultaneously had the urge to itch my nose. I reached up to scratch my nose without thinking, only to turn my nose into a matte brown Rudolph. Removing powder without a brush is harder than you would think.
Somehow everyone ended up dressed and smiling. Robyn’s magic took it from there. The images captured as we slide through the last quarter of our 7000 days makes it worth all the chaos, but please learn from my mistakes! twitter | facebook