No Means Absolutely, Positively Never Going to Happen

School pictures are this Friday. Order forms came home today. I handed the sheet to Natalie and asked her to choose which pose she'd like to do.

Moments later, she handed it back to me.

*sigh*

Being a very intuitive person, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I don't think she wants her picture taken at school. Again.

I don't understand it! I pull out the camera at home and she morphs from a sweet little girl into a vixen ready for a Whitesnake video. I laugh and Tom cries.

Put her in front of a professional photographer's lens, though, and she is freezes like Cindy Brady on the quiz show episode. Observe her most recent school picture, taken last fall, if you don't believe me:

I call it "Portrait of a Constipated-looking Five Year Old Who Stepped in Dog Poo While Eating a Lemon."

That stinking picture set me back $37 dollars, not to mention what it cost to buy stuff to bribe her into doing it.

Fall pictures had to be paid for in advance so I crossed my fingers and wrote the check. I won't make that mistake again. Spring pictures, for whatever reason, get sent home for us to see before we decide whether to buy them so I don't have to spend anything -- with the photographer, at least -- to have her sit for the camera. The mental costs are just too high for me, though.

At this point, I don't even care about a solo shot. I have a billion pictures of her in my photo library, all better than what the school photographer could take because she is comfortable with me while "the stranger photographer is VERY SCARY, Mommy!!!" Uh-huh, right. I'm sure Lifetouch has hired Swamp Thing to photograph kindergarteners.

I'm going to let her win this one. Can't get blood from a stone, after all, and experience has taught me that my girl is nothing if not mulish when it comes to standing her ground.

What I really want is for her to sit for the class photo. She says that she won't. If she doesn't, I think she'll regret it someday. I mean, it's not like I look at my kindergarten class picture every day (or even every decade) but it was funny to post it on Facebook and laugh about how little and cute we were with the friends who are in it. I don't want Nat to be flying around in her hovercraft 30 years from now, wishing that she'd sat with her class back in the good old days when gas cost only $3.60/gallon and people vacationed on an island rather than on the moon.

I am girding myself to approach that battle. God help me. God help her teacher. Will she do it? Is it worth it? Only time will tell.