Have you ever made a really bad decision, but didn’t realize it at the time? Then later the gravity of your mistake began to sink in and weigh heavy on your conscience? That feeling describes how our family felt last night after having our family portrait taken for our church’s directory.
After we took the pictures, we faced a slick salesman who kept us distracted by talking to us and the kids about their summer activities. Before we knew it, we’d spent over $360 on a package of pictures– money we weren’t planning to spend nor had we even budgeted for this event. The worst part of it is that we didn’t like any of the pictures! Seriously! Not a single one. While we were viewing the computer proofs, we struggled to find poses we all liked. The colors were off, the backgrounds were blah, and somebody was either blinking or half-laughing in almost every one. We really didn’t look like us.
When we went to get ice cream afterwards, we all agreed we spent too much money on something none of us really liked. Even the kids felt like we wasted our money. That’s the good thing about having teenage kids– they are old enough to take part in family decisions (even bad ones) and understand what’s going on most of the time. Strange as it sounds, I felt we were really close as a family while we sat there eating our ice cream and voicing our feelings about the pictures. We were more genuine at that moment than we were in the posed pictures of an hour earlier.
Today I’ll call the studio and see if we can cancel our order. We really don’t want those pictures hanging in our house (yes, they were that bad!). I don’t want to give them out to family either. In fact, we really want to forget about the whole deal. I hope I can talk my way out of our bad decision and convince the studio we’ll schedule an appointment for a better family portrait sometime in the future.
UPDATE: I called the studio and they cancelled our order. Whew! What a relief! And they didn’t even give me a hard time. When they asked which pose I wanted for our complimentary 8×10, I told them we didn’t even want the free picture– that’s how much we disliked the pictures. I want to totally forget about the whole thing, as though it never happened. I’m so relieved they didn’t make us keep it or switch to another package.
