The Days Are Just Packed!

Wow, I can't believe it's Friday already. This week has gone by in a blur! I don't know why, but every day has passed in a rush, and then melted together, and I haven't even gotten my shopping done yet! That's okay, because it's not like we're exactly flush right now, but Kroger is having an awesome canned-food sale that I don't want to miss. We're going to go this evening, I have all thirty-seven (thirty-seven!) of my coupons ready. Here's hoping it all goes smoothly!

Yesterday, Robert and Jami and I went out to the mall to get Robert's Halloween pictures taken. We had been planning to do it on Tuesday, I had a ride from Jami arranged and the appointments made and everything, but then I let M drive off with the carseat! Argh! I couldn't even think about using the big-boy front-facing carseat because that's up in the storage area and M has the only key. Double Argh! We ended up going on a walk instead, which was nice, but it was still a very frustrating afternoon. So today I scheduled again, for Sears and JC Penney both, since I had coupons for both and they're in the same mall. Might as well, right? It's tons cheaper to get one package from two places than to get two poses from one place. Studios are weird that way.

Anyhow, I got a call from Penneys, our usual place, to say that their server was down, so that while they could take the pictures, they couldn't show them to us that day, and we'd have to come back another day. That didn't sound very good. We went over to Sears for the appointment, and did okay. I don't like them as well as Penney's, honestly. It was obviously the same franchise of photo studio as the one at Walmart, the website setup and even the signs were the same, and Walmart was just awful. The photographers tried hard, but none of them really had what it takes to work with babies. One thing I've learned is that you have to make a fool of yourself to get a good picture of a baby, and none of these women would even talk in a loud high voice. I had to do it myself to get any smiles from him. They also decided to take more pictures (or the manager did, she made them do it and tossed some of the earlier photos because apparently the seat he'd been on wasn't safe, and getting rid of the evidence was crucial or something. That was weird.

So at the end of the shoot, they had six decent pictures of him, minus all the ones the manager deleted. That's a lot less than our Penney's shoots have been, and it took longer. Part of that is because Robert is crawling now, granted. He doesn't want to stay! After five minutes that turned to fifteen waiting for proofs, they showed us a whole bunch of collages and enhancements and all that, then persisted in trying to sell me a four hundred dollar photo package. Bwa-ha-ha! I bought my one little photo package and confirmed that things would be online, because the grandparents usually like to buy pictures too. As I found out, they put the natural photos on, but none of those fancy enhancements they made. Another reason I like them less than Penneys, who put all the enhanced pictures up to buy as well. Ah well, it was an okay session and we got some cute pictures that will be here next week! (And yeah, they put giant watermarks on as well. This is the photo we bought, pretty cute, huh?)