Taking It One Day At A Time

Family photos are, how shall I put this… interesting? I like the pictures, but the process… not so much. Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe it’s just my kids. (I’m going to go with the latter on this one.)

The Facts of Life

When having a family picture taken, it’s inevitable that as one child looks at the camera, another will look away. It’s a fact of life. Cows chew their cud, chickens peck the ground, road runners escape and outwit coyotes, and children never simultaneously look at a camera.

Sometimes I think a magical, invisible string is attached to their faces. One end is fastened to the ear of the first child and the other to the nose of a second – preventing even the possibility of them looking the same direction.

Parents can sometimes break this invisible string if they yell, jump up and down like fools, and frantically wave whatever is nearby (sticks, leaves, small poodles). However, being a magic string, it reconnects immediately following any breakage.

The Chaoss Scale

This fact of life produces a traumatic effect on parents, which can be measured and quantified in a manner similar to the Richter scale. (For each tenth point the traumatic effect is multiplied 10 times.) It’s known as the CHAOSS (Children Having Acute Overactive Sensory Stimuli) scale. Let me give you the math. (If you don’t like math, then you can skip the next paragraph of it… kinda like you did in school.)

The age of the child is inversely proportional to the trauma of the parent. So the younger the child is, the more traumatic family pictures become. Here’s the formula to calculate the traumatic effect of family portraits on parents. Subtract the age of the child from the average lifespan of a person (say 70 for easy math). Then divide that number by the result of multiplying the age of the child by 10. Add all children together.

Having four young children, we’re about a 13.1 on the CHAOSS scale. Imagine a 13.1 earthquake and you’ll have something close to the traumatic effect we endure with family pictures.

The Trauma

Bottom line: it’s hard. Really hard.

One child looks and smiles, the second sticks his leg in the air. A third looks and smiles while the fourth is playing with the grass. The second decides to look and smile (because of a recent verbal barrage from the parents) when the third puts her hand in her mouth and shows us the apple from which she just took a bite. The fourth is still playing with the grass. The first puts his head down as the apple is swallowed by the third. The fourth finally looks up with a confused stare at the flailing arms and loud emotive sounds coming from just behind the camera, while the second falls down. The third shoos away bugs as the first is chomping on and proudly display his gum.

After loud shouts, clapping hands, and the waving of leaves, sticks, nearby small animals, and any other non-translucent object, the magic, invisible string breaks, and all four children look at the camera for an instant. Then the fourth looks back at the grass, the third complains about pieces of apple in her teeth, the second puts his leg back in the air and the first begins to wander away. One second for a picture in the thousand seconds that it took to get it. The parents are… well, I don’t know if they are at all any longer.

This is the CHAOSS scale at work.

And We Have The Photos To Prove It

Keep in mind, our photographer did a fantastic job of getting the absolute best shots from the entire thousand seconds. The ones with legs in the air, children falling on the ground, and so on, weren’t taken.

And the winner is… ?

Well, at least they’re all looking at the camera… sorta.