9 month pictures . . . almost the death of me!

Per "someone's" request, here's a retelling of my experience at Alyssa's 9 month pictures. I copied and pasted from an e-mail that I sent to a good friend this morning.

Okay, here's my horrific picture experience from yesterday. I get all stressed just thinking about it. My sister had mentioned last weekend that she needed new pictures of Alyssa, so I invited Joni and Anna (my niece) to meet us at pictures so that Joni could pick out which ones she wanted. Dumb, dumb, DUMB move! My niece is one of the most obnoxious children you will ever meet. She has no self control, my sister doesn't try to control her and most times after being around her for 20 minutes or more I just want to throw her out a window. So we get to Penney's and there is only one girl working and she's totally frazzled. She's trying to get the phone, help people that want to pick up pictures, and get us started. She was really sweet and really apologetic and gave us 2 free sheets of pictures because there were so many interruptions which was really nice. As soon as Joni and Anna get there, Anna starts hanging all over Alyssa, poking her, pulling her binky out of her mouth, getting all up in her face, etc. I know she's just excited and loves her baby cousin, but seriously! So I kept asking her to give Alyssa some space because she was getting a little overwhelmed and she would leave her alone for about 10 seconds. We finally get into the little teeny tiny room to have pictures done and get Alyssa set up. Melanie (the photographer) and I are calling Alyssa's name, clapping, etc trying to get her to look and smile. Well, Anna keeps going in and grabbing her nose and tickling her and all this stuff, which Alyssa is not having. So she starts wailing. I finally get her calmed down and we change clothes to do new shots and the same thing happens all over again. Alyssa is completely overwhelmed because she's trying to look at the camera, but this dumb person keeping yelling at her and grabbing her. So I finally ask my sister (who's just standing in there not doing anything) to go out in the waiting area and take Anna with her until Alyssa calms down a little. Joni decides that she needs to go have a smoke (because its been 20 minutes since her last one and she'll die if she doesn't get a cigarette every 15 minutes or so), so she leaves Anna in the waiting room with instructions to not come back unless I say its okay. So, every 2 minutes she's popping her head in asking if she can come in yet, which distracts an already "unstable" baby. Then enter my dad's ex-wife . . . the wicked witch of the midwest. She's a horrible, awful person. (She drove my Joni and Anna to the mall) She comes in and is all "Christi, why is she crying? Why is she so unhappy? Why is this taking so long?!" and just looks totally annoyed with me. So I finally looked at Melanie and said to just wrap things up. Then I didn't care for ANY of the pictures she took. It wasn't her fault ~ she did an awesome job with poses/backgrounds, it was just that Alyssa didn't really smile in any of them. Or if she did look like she was smiling I could tell it was a "I'm about to wail" grimace instead of a smile. A few of the pictures she still had her binky in because it was the only way we could get her to stop crying. I ordered 4 pictures and made an appointment to go back next week to try them again. This time I'm going ALONE! I could tell that Melanie felt awful about everything, so I requested to set up another time when she was working, so I think that made her feel better. I'm going to write a letter to her manager and sing her praises (and also suggest that they have 2 people working at all time, because we were interrupted every 5 minutes at least). I think part of it was that pictures took over an hour. If two people were working and one could just focus on taking pictures, it probably would have taken 20 minutes and would have gone a lot smoother. Ugh!