"We'll call it Operation Pluto"

Suttie’s 9-month photo session was this week, and things seemed to go well. But whenever there’s a photo session looming, I begin to feel like Eisenhower on D-day. It’s all about strategy….strategies for what he’ll wear, what we’ll wear, and what the schedule for that day will be. It’s like choreographing a toddler ballet, you can put together a beautiful dance, but at the end of the day, you’ve got kids hanging from the stage curtains and somebody’s pooped in a leotard.

The first step in picture planning is to locate and purchase the perfect outfit(s). Does the perfect outfit exist? No. Do we spend hours (literally hours) trying to find it? Yes. I spent a week searching through the homemade goods of desperate housewives on Etsy looking for the perfect green knit hat. And I finally found it—an adorable number with knit teddy-bear ears. But when it arrived, I discovered that it wasn’t the same shade of green as the outfit it was meant to accessorize. Did I cry? A little. Did he wear it just the same? Abso-friggin-lutely…because, at that point, my hands shook when I tried to type “green baby hat” into a search engine.

Normally, the next step is to find our outfits. Thankfully that wasn’t a problem this go round because Suttie was the only one being photographed. Otherwise, I would have spent at least another week scouring the racks of our local department stores (twice) only to end up ordering our things online last minute.

And then comes the hardest process of all. Figuring out how in the hell you are going to work in breakfast, lunch, and naptime in an order that even remotely resembles his normal routine. Now this is where I start to channel Erwin Rommel more than Eisenhower because, no matter how organized or well-thought out my plan is, I always end up shouting like a Nazi with allies storming my dad-gum beaches. And by “allies,” I mean my naptime-fighting baby, and by “beaches,” I mean my sanity. If the 0900 nap is blown, then the whole mission is a bust. So in a desperate attempt to claim victory, we take to the road, hoping that the vibrations of the car will put him under. And they do…ten minutes before his session starts.

So why do we go through this? It’s not like I don’t have somewhere around 1000 photos of him that I took and had developed (almost for free) in albums that are stacked chest-high in his closet…

Oh, I’m sorry; were you waiting for me to answer myself because that question wasn’t rhetorical.