The Perfect Family Holiday Shot

 

Follow these simple steps and you can create
gorgeous holiday card pictures like this one!

As the holidays approach, we thought our readers could use some helpful hints to help make things more manageable. Today's blog is a guest post from Kate Rose, who brings us her expertise in today's post - The Perfect Family Holiday Shot:

What annual occurrence causes my pulse to race, my palms to sweat, and my lungs to constrict with each breath?  April 15^th, you ask?  Taking my kids for their flu shot? A visit from the in-laws?  No. None of these occurrences cause the fear, the frustration, the anticipation, and (hopefully) the eventual exhilaration of, wait for it…capturing the Perfect Family Holiday Shot.  That’s right, that picture which will go on our annual Holiday Card. That picture which will hang on the doors of friends and family for an entire holiday season.  That picture, which defines our family unit as well as my worth as a mother.  That picture which conveys all that we are pretending our past year together as a family unit to be (educational trips to the Botanical Gardens, flawless piano recitals, siblings embracing while singing at church).  In reality, though, what we want our family definition to be and what our family definition actually is (peanut butter causing an eyelid to stick shut, tantrums at the mommy-and-me music, goldfish-crusted car seats), are usually two very different things.

There are many steps that go into creating the Perfect Family Holiday card, from cropping, printing, mail merging, and stamping, to shoving those things into the big blue mailbox 3 days before Christmas.  While those are all important and tedious steps, today I am here to tell you about the most important, agonizing, heart-wrenching, wine-inducing step of them all.  We will refer to this step as “OBTAINING THE PERFECT FAMILY HOLIDAY SHOT” 

There are two schools of thought regarding the Perfect Family Holiday Shot, and I am going to briefly address both, and provide some valuable tips to help ensure your card will be the envy of all your family, friends, and of course, the all important frenemies. 

The first option (and one which my family has subscribed to for the past 5 years after 3 years of trying option 2) is:

OPTION 1: Starting January 1^st, take a camera everywhere, and torture your spouse and children by snapping shots ALL.THE.TIME. 

1.)    This option does require the entire family to dress nicely every day.  Or at least be showered.  Or maybe just have combed hair. 

2.)    You never know the time and place that the magic moment will occur…are you all together at the dentist, Dunkin Donuts, the grocery store?  Don’t hold back!  Snap, snap, snap and quite possibly you will end up with the perfect family shot (no one will ever know you were all at the DMV!)

3.)    (In direct opposition to number 2) Consider your background.  Hey, everyone looks happy at the beach!  Who doesn’t love walking through the woods! Even the most terrible-two-toddler can look cute making snow angels! 

4.)    Know your family’s limits.  If your 3 year old (for some God-forsaken reason) cannot understand how to ‘peak out’ from behind a tree, then he just can’t understand how to ‘peak out’ from a tree.  Leave it.  Don’t yell.  Don’t compare him to his siblings at that age.   Don’t take 80 shots.  Just leave it. 

5.)    Bribe, bribe, bribe!  (“I’ll give you an M&M if you’ll peek out from behind that tree!”) 

 

On to Option 2.  I’m going to be honest here…Option 2 is not ideal…I mean, go for it if you think your family has the wherewithal…I am going to give some tips, but really, I mean, really think about this before you commit…

 

OPTION 2:  Take your family to a photo shoot

1.)     Probably only have one kid (or less) if you are considering this option.

2.)     No drinks.  Nobody!  Or anybody.  Nobody drink anything for at least 24 hours before the appointment.  Parents—this is so there won’t be any puffy eyes or hang-over signs. You CANNOT be the limiting factor in these pictures.  Kids—nothing worse than breaking the photographer’s rhythm because Jonny “has to go potty”, or worse… “just did”. 

3.)    Identify the weakest link.  Does mom have a tendency to do “pouty lips” in pictures?  Does Bobby close his eyes when he smiles?  Does Mary scream when separated from her “My Little Pony” doll?  Whoever the weakest link might be…yell, threaten, and bribe.  Fix it, people. 

4.)    The photographer is joking when he asks if the family brought a change of clothes.  NO!  Are you kidding me?  You think anyone can drag three kids here in their holiday finery, snap a few shots, and then change their clothes? 

5.)    These professional places take 300 digital shots for a reason.  All you need is ONE.  Identify it.  Pay for it.  Mail it out. 

 

In summary, this post is titled “The Perfect Family Holiday Shot” for a reason.  Regardless of whether you decide on Option 1 or Option 2, I really wanted to call this post “The Perfect Shot”.  Because that’s what all parents will need after attempting to get the beloved holiday picture.

Dogs

"Want me to, hmmm, deficate on your rug?"

Every so often, Andrea says that she might like to get a puppy. All I can think is, “are you nuts?” You don’t have challenges enough already that you want an untrained juvenile animal running around your house? You want stains and surprises everywhere? You want holes chewed in your carpet? You want dog hair on all of your clothes? Not to mention the furniture - Cody wetting himself on the dining room chair, as he sometimes does, would be like an expert refurbishment compared to what a dog would do to it.

Never mind that Andrea is – ahem – a clean individual. The kids are – ahem – not. And dogs are – ahem, ahem – really not. Our children making messes creates enough friction. At least they are flesh and blood offspring and some evolutionary emotional restraint kicks in before things get too severe. I’m not sure what would save poor Fido.

I’ll be honest and say that I simply do not understand the desire to get a pet. I have nothing against them, really, but it is simply not a compulsion that I feel. I would no sooner snuggle and hug and kiss and roll around on the floor with a dog than I would a sheep at the petting zoo. As far as I can tell, pets are almost as much work as children without the (for me) emotional reward.

(In case you can’t tell, I’ve softened my statements in the paragraph above. This is because you do not want to get on the wrong side of dog people, who can turn violently insane at rhetoric like that above. So therefore, dog people, I want to take a moment and be perfectly clear: It’s not you, it’s me. It is totally normal and rational to want another species in your house defecating on the floor and destroying your possessions. I obviously have a deep character flaw.)

Here’s our one family experience with pets: One summer, at the church picnic, the kids won two goldfish as prizes from one of the games. My reaction was “oh man, God hates us,” which didn’t take too long to prove true. We found the burden of feeding a goldfish daily and washing the bowl weekly to be too much to bear. Goldfish are normally a short-lived species. This was true for us for one of them, who met his demise within three weeks. For the other, we apparently got the Methuselah of goldfish. 18 months after that church picnic, we were still faithfully scrubbing his bowl each Sunday and counting down the days to his passing.

As the pets get bigger than fish, the commitment only increases. The tank you have to clean gets larger. The weekly scrubbing gets harder. I know people who literally have to schedule vacations around their pets. I just don’t have the time or patience for that nonsense.

Therefore, we will never, ever, ever, ever, ever have another pet in our household so long as I have a say. Which means that, someday, we will have another pet.  Because I don’t really have a say. The world, it turns out, does not function on rationality. Otherwise, Gucci and Hummer and the band One Direction would be out of business. And the species would probably be extinct. Because, let’s face it, having children is about as rational as having a dog. Children don’t tend the farm any more. We don’t need them to fend off saber-tooth tigers. But some of us, the crazy ones, manage to convince ourselves we do need them to help clean the dog doo off the carpet.

How does a Wookie brush his teeth?

All parents know that Chewbacca works hard
to keep his pearly whites battle-ready!

One benefit when Cody turned four was that he finally outgrew his morbid terror of brushing his teeth. Tooth brushing, which should be a quick and easy – even pleasant – undertaking, was a real challenge with Cody. Cody would fight and squirm and complain that I was hurting him while I brushed his teeth. I’ve always had very good dental hygiene and take it seriously, so when it’s my turn to aid with brushing I try to do a thorough job. Cody hates the thorough job.

To gain compliance, I had several tactics at my disposal. My native tendency – grabbing him roughly and screaming at him to brush – had obvious drawbacks. So instead, I had to get creative. Cody, as he’s aged, has evolved in his likes and dislikes, and so therefore my teeth brushing methods have evolved with him. Begging and pleading isn’t sufficient for the job, so I, as a grown man, became a twice daily circus act in the kids’ bathroom.

It all started with “Robot Toothbrush,” which goes something like this: Daddy stands and moves very stiffly and mechanically and repeatedly says (in his most metallic voice) “Robot Toothbrush. Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner.” The ner-ner-ners should coordinate with the up-and-down or side-to-side motion of the toothbrush in the mouth. Robot Toothbrush lasted for the better part of the two’s with decent success – so much so that Andrea started using it on her turns as well. As a side note, it’s one of life’s great joys to watch Andrea, whom I consider one of the most buttoned-up people I know, saying “Robot Toothbrush. Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner.”

Times pass, and the fascination with robots has faded (unless, of course, the robots turn into cars or shoot people, which makes them super cool). So we lapsed back into begging and pleading mode. That is, until our latest Star Wars craze and the advent of “Wookie Toothbrush.” Wookie Toothbrush means Cody and Daddy open our mouths as wide as possible to allow guttural Rrrrrowwwwaggghh sounds to come out… and the toothbrush to go in. The toothpaste suds foaming at the mouth helps with the analogy. Pretending to be a Wookie buys you a solid 15-30 seconds of quality tooth brushing.

In between Robot Toothbrush and Wookie Toothbrush, for a time I was grasping with straws. For a while the fascination was with super heroes, so we tried various forms of “Super Hero Toothbrush,” such as “C’mon Cody, want to brush your teeth like… er, um… Spider Man?!?!?” The problem is, it turns out that Spider Man brushes his teeth more or less like everyone else, so Cody was never really convinced. (This week’s challenge is for you to come up with Spider Man inspired tooth brushing method).

What finally solved the issue, once and for all as far as I can tell, is Cody turning four and deciding he can brush teeth all by himself. Cody can now lightly glaze the toothbrush over a subset of his teeth for 3-5 seconds and consider it done. It ain’t thorough. It ain’t hygiene. But at least we are back to raising a human boy and not a Wookie or Robot.

Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner!

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Ah, the Power of Stickers



The Holy Grail of Child Discipline:
Fruit Loops

I’ve discussed household discipline, or the lack thereof, in maybe my favorite post ever. Back then, our primary disciplinary method was time-outs. I’m going to be frank, they simply weren’t working. No matter how long or how short, on the stairs or in the room, the threat of time out simply wasn’t enough to motivate away from bad behavior.

So we changed strategies. Our next method was the withholding of privileges. First, the kids lost their wretched “Scooby-Doo: First Frights” video game for a week. This was as much a reward for Andrea and me as it was a punishment for them¹. Next came the “Robots” movie, which they had watched portions of a record 28 consecutive days in a row. Candy and cookies went out the door. So did the I-Pad and computer.

But here’s the problem – none of this worked. Pretty soon we were withholding basic human rights. Since the experts all say consistency and follow-through are the thing, we just had to keep after it. If we said, “stop hitting or I’ll cut off my left pinky,” and there’s another hit, the pinky’s got to go. And so it went with privileges: threaten to take away, bad behavior continues, privileges revoked. We even had a privileges chart that showed WHO had lost WHAT until WHEN, showing that Chiara could earn back the Scooby Doo game in time for graduation from college.

Things kept escalating, but when Cody lost food and water for a week we knew it was time for a change. And so we changed our strategy once again. Our new philosophy is “you attract more flies with Fruit Loops than vinegar.”

Thus began the sticker chart. I cannot believe the power of stickers. Our children will go from acting like animals to little angels with the promise of a sticker on a chart. Mind you, these are the same stickers they could reach into the drawer and reward themselves with any time they felt moved to do so. It’s not beyond Chiara’s reach to draw up a grid on a piece of paper and sticker it to her heart’s delight. But somehow, our chart, and the reward of stickers gets the job done. Plus, there is one additional prize at the end of the rainbow. If the children earn enough stickers over the course of the week they can have the sugar cereal of their choice for breakfast one day.

The children are small, and their minds work differently than mine. This is imminently clear. I would have thought the immediate threat of banishment to your room would curtail bad behavior, but it never seemed to. Little did I know that the distant promise of Fruit Loops in the future could get little ones in line. This parenting gig is a learning experience for sure, and many of those lessons are learned through trial and error. I just wish prior errors hadn’t cost me my pinky.

I do see one risk on the horizon. Chiara has shown some signs of taking a page out of the Cleveland Brown’s book: tanking. She’s figured out that you can’t lose the same sticker twice, and once the week has been blown, you might as well go for broke. What she hasn’t figured out is that losing all her stickers won’t get her Johnny Manziel. It will just lose you a bunch of bowls of Fruit Loops.

 

¹I can hardly begin to describe how bad this video game is. One would think, as we did, that something branded Scooby Doo would be wholesome, harmless, goofy fun. Well this game is full of violence and frustration. First, the characters physically fight the abundant monsters. Scooby literally hits monsters with sausage links; Velma throws books at them. Second, characters must jump from platform to wobbly platform – this is tough sometimes even for me with my video game skills, much less my 3-year-old. And here’s the absolute worst part – despite the anger, frustration and tears, my kids want to play this god-forsaken game all the time. It is something they ask to do almost every day.

Captain America and Iron Man Share Wardrobe Tips

"Pssst... Is your name Pee-Pee Face?"

I’ve written before how Cody has many fewer activities than Chiaradoes. For many reasons, Cody has had to teach himself to play by himself. Those reasons are 1) Cody is too young to be in as many activities that draw adult attention; 2) As older and therefore a better communicator, Chiara is better able to interact with adults and therefore draw their attention; 3) As a second child we’re just way more worn out – it’s not pretty, but it is true.

Thus, Cody spends a lot of time playing with toys by himself. Superhero action figures are a favorite. He  will literally lie on the floor for hours acting out conversations between these characters.

Let me state publically that the writers at Marvel and Warner Brothers are at no risk of losing their jobs to Cody’s story lines. Cody’s action figures mainly discuss one another’s physical appearance and names. Here’s what the next movie would be like as written by Cody Kimmel:

 

THE AVENGERS 3: Is Your Name Pee-Pee Face?

The scene opens to The Avenger’s secret lair. Captain America works feverishly on the mega-computer. Something is awry. The huge screen flickers – static lines clear and the face of The General appears.

General: Captain America, we have an urgent mission for the Avengers. The Joker’s evil forces have been unleashed on the city!

Captain America (SHOUTING): DO YOU HAVE A MOUSTACHE?

General: Uh,yes. Yes I do have a moustache.

Captain America: ARE YOU WEARING PURPLE?

General: No, I’m wearing green… with gold medals.

The control room’s sliding steel doors open with a whisk. Captain America turns to see Iron Man enter the room.

Iron Man: I’M HERE, YOU CATOOHEY¹!

Captain America: IS YOUR NAME PEE-PEE HEAD?

Iron Man: I’M NOT PEE-PEE HEAD YOU, YOU TARKEYBOON¹!

Captain America: ARE YOU YELLOW HORSE FACE?

Iron Man: I’M IRON MAN!

Captain America: OH IRON MAN! HELLO IRON MAN!

Captain America and Iron Man slam their heads and bodies together repeatedly (this is Cody’s traditional greeting for all his Action Figures – their relationships are apparently built on mutual physical brutality).

General: Uh, hey, fellahs? We have a mission here. The Joker is out there and the city needs your help!

Captain America: DO YOU WEAR PANTS?

The General and the Avengers continue to discuss wardrobe and excrement-based nomenclature for several more minutes. Eventually they decide to go face The Joker, who is driving in his Joker Tank.

Iron Man: There he is!

No need for prolonged discussion or showdown scene here. The Avengers bash The Joker and his tank with their feet until parts are scattered everywhere. The entire climactic battle scene takes about four seconds.

After thoroughly trouncing The Joker, the discussion of clothing selection continues. The Joker and The Avengers quickly forget they were ever enemies…

Captain America (to The Joker): ARE YOU WEARING PURPLE?

The End

 

Every so often I ask Cody what his action figures are up to. Chiara has her babies, and if asked, will readily let you know that the baby is hungry, tired, going shopping, or whatever. Cody will say “they’re just toys, Dad” with a tone of “are you an idiot?” It’s a “duh” moment; Cody has reduced me to a human dodo… or maybe a catoohey yellow horse face purple pants.

 

¹Cody has a penchant for creating names to call people. Not knowing all the right and proper insults, he tends to just make them up. Many times while trying to get him to brush his teeth have I been called a Gahkie or a Scooch.

A translator

"I don't understand it, Bones. The translators
aren't working with these life forms!"

Over the course of my parenting journey, one thing I’ve learned is that young children and adults simply do not speak the same language. It sounds the same – it uses many of the same words, and many of the same phrases. But there are many different meanings and contexts depending on who is speaking. It’s sort of like how the English say “pram” and “lorry” when they mean “buggy” and “truck,” only a lot more frustrating and a lot less Monty-Python-like.

So, to help the uninitiated parent navigate this strange, alternative land of quasi-English, I’ve put together the following translation guide. Here are some examples:

Child says: I want to help (make a cake, clean the car, water the plants).

Translation: I want to dump the contents of that container everywhere, and help make your cake-baking process slower, messier and more work than you had ever planned on. As a bonus, once dirty, I’ll probably go running around the house, spreading the dirtiness on your walls and carpet. By the way, I’m holding you hostage at this point. If you refuse me the opportunity to dump milk on this counter, I promise you that I am prepared to throw the tantrum of a lifetime. Have you heard of a no-win situation? WELCOME TO NO-WIN TOWN, BUDDY!
 
Child says: I want (pasta, chicken, pancakes) for dinner.

Translation: There is some possibility that, if you go to the effort of making the dish I have requested, I will eat it. I reserve the right to complain about the food, ignore it, or even demand something else once it actually becomes time to eat it. I’m saying I want it now, not that I will necessarily want it in the future. Listen, Dad, there really are no guarantees in life. It’s really time you learned that important lesson.

Child says: Yes, I promise I will be good.

Translation: I will say absolutely anything to get that reward you are dangling in front of me. Will I follow through with my end of the bargain? Eh, we’ll see how that goes once the temptation to misbehave is back in sight. What did I tell you before about guarantees? Caveat Emptor, Dad.

In fairness, communication is a two-way street, and certain things you think you’ve communicated do not come through the way you think they do, so we need a reverse-translator. Here are some examples:

You say: Don’t tell your sister (you got a treat, you went to this place).¹

They hear: The moment you are in your sister’s presence, taunt her mercilessly about having gotten something she didn’t. Send any issues my way! I’d be delighted to clean up the inevitable mess this is going to cause in your relationship.

You say: Not now/not today.

They hear: Badger me endlessly about this. It will annoy and possibly enrage me, and may result in punishment for you. It will almost certainly ruin a perfectly good car trip. But hey, there’s an outside chance I might capitulate. Or at least cut a deal. This negotiating tactic is great training to make you a Tea-Party Congressperson someday.

You say: Be nice to your brother.

They hear: Hurl insults at your brother. Mock and scorn him. Physically abuse him and scream at him. Yes, I agree it really is important that you play with that one toy, right now – even though you’ve had no interest in it for weeks, and in fact had no interest in it today until the moment he picked it up.

With these simple translations, you’ll be well equipped to understand your children. Not that better understanding will do you much good – you’ll still be at their mercy. You’ll just understand what you are getting yourself into better.

Maybe next time, I’ll create a translator for communicating with your husband. (Hint: It involves lots of grunting).

 

¹Thanks to Kate Rose for reminding me of this one.