Two Year Olds and Cameras Just Don't Mix

For some other worldly reason I thought that I would get the boys' pictures taken together. Now I'm decently skilled in the fine art of digital photography, or at least I like to think so (when it comes to taking pictures of my jewelry and journals at least... which coincidentally don't move.) But I can snap a cute picture of Brayden and Gage together and smiling every now and again. And silly me thought that it would be no problem to take them to a professional to have their pictures done.

Boy oh Boy was I dead wrong.

We got the The Picture People, which is an hour away from where we live, at 4:30 yesterday. I was super careful to set up our appointment at a time when Gage could take a nap and not be a crab for the event. Well, in the land of two year olds sometimes a nap just isn't in the cards, at least in their little minds it isn't anyhow. When Gage fell asleep in the car on the ride there I thought that it would be perfect; a nice little snooze to mellow him out right before the pictures.

Unfortunately he didn't want to wake up nor did he want to have his picture taken right after waking up and proceeded to scream bloody murder for around 30 minutes in the picture studio.

Finally someone gave him a giant punching balloon, which stopped the tantrum but left him running all around the studio away from the photo backdrop, chasing the thing and bopping the photographer in the face and in the cameras face as well. And of course in a matter of 5 minutes Gage was tired of the balloon, but still adamantly refused to sit down beside Brayden for a picture.

Next Gage discovered that he could walk behind the backdrop, which is on a great big roll thing for when they change them, like a tunnel. He decided he liked to hide back there, much to my dismay. And when I finally pulled him out of his new hidey hole, so that I would not be buying a new photography studio, it brought on whole other round of crying and tantrum throwing.

We're now about 45 minutes into this and I'm pretty sure that the photographer was able to click her camera about 3 times and none of the pictures are usable because there is either a giant green punching balloon in them or Gage is screaming his head off. I found a few blocks in a bin and gave them to Gage to try and stop his crying, which to my utter amazement worked. After drying his poor little eyes and positioning him beside his brother to play with the blocks the photographer was finally able to get a few shots between Gage throwing the wooden blocks at her head and his constant attempts to get up and carry the blocks around.

I should add that through all of this Brayden was a perfect angel and sat just as he was told and smiled beautifully for every single click of the camera. He may or may not have egged his brother on when it came to chasing the giant balloon around the room, but at that point I really didn't care and was ready to give up anyways.

I finally told the photographer that we had enough I was sure that there was not one usable photo in the bunch and that I would be stuck paying some outrageous sitting fee and getting nothing in return.

But by some miracle out of the pictures we got a few usable shots and one absolutely amazing one that I ended up getting a gigantic 12x24 print of for my wall and about 99% of my other prints of. I'm sure by looking at the pics you can tell which one it is :)

Morel of the story - I was a darn fool to think that I could get the boys' pictures taken and it would be as easy as pie, nothing ever is when you're dealing with a 2 year old boy!

PS: Sorry for the watermarks on the pictures, these are the ones I got from our session on the Picture People website, seeing as I didn't buy the crappy ones I didn't have any of those to scan into the computer, and the ones that I did have to scan into the computer I was far far too lazy to actually do.