Life Stories and Beyond

Senior Year with Triplets:

Reminiscing Over Photos for the Senior Yearbook Page

It’s real. Oh my gosh! They’re seniors. All three of our eighteen-year-old kids are likely to go to college and leave us as empty nesters next year. I can’t stop reminiscing while trying to pick out pictures of important times in our triplets’ lives. Photos of round-headed babies, who soon morphed into white-haired preschoolers, climbing trees and mulch piles lie scattered around my office along with dress up shots of them as three pumpkins, three horses, or three GI Joes. In almost every picture, there’s a friend, making them look like quads or quints. Often their friends were another set of triplets. Such fun. Tweens became teens. As they mastered snow and water on skis and boards I must have stood around snapping lots of action shots.

Now it’s time to condense thousands of photos into the most important ones and make a senior page for the high school yearbook. I am not alone. Parents all over the country are doing the same thing. I’m just working in triplicate.

No stress. The senior page I make for our trio will remain in their high school yearbook forever and can either make or break their delicate psyche. I’ve only spent weeks torturing myself over which ones are the best pictures to represent their entire lives. So should I make three separate pages, which would reduce their college funds by half a semester? Combining all three onto one page might make their photos so tiny it won’t really matter what the pictures are. Maybe I’ll just use lots of pictures of all three of them together. But is that fair? Shouldn’t they have the chance to be individuals? That’s an unsolved dilemma we’ve faced numerous times in eighteen years.

Yesterday, hoping to get good current senior pictures, I tried to purchase two photos of each of the three kids. The simple senior photo session required for each student to have their picture in the school yearbook produced twenty-seven beautiful photos with the word PROOF stamped across the front. So we got twenty-seven times three. Boys were required to get a photo in a tux and girls had the black drape and pearls photo so everybody looks the same in the yearbook. Next, the kids posed in regular clothes for more pictures. This is where the heartstrings pull the parents in to buy more pictures. My three kids went in with the attitude of, “I’m going to get a yearbook shot and I’m coming home. We don’t need a bunch of other pictures.”

That’s the spirit. We take great pictures all the time. That’s what I thought until I opened three fat mailers a few weeks later when the proofs arrived. There were my kids, leaning all up against fake trees, propping with one foot on a brick wall, and straddling a chair.

I started thinking. Dang, those are good-looking people. I know we don’t need
eighty-one pictures but maybe we need just a couple of each kid without PROOF on their chest.

I put it out of my mind when the kids all said, “Mom, we can take better pictures than those. Don’t worry about it. They’re too expensive. You’re a good photographer. We don’t need them.”

Then the e-mail came. One-day-only discount. Online only. I couldn’t resist. Just two shots of each kid. That’s all I’d get. A la cart. No huge package. I sat at the computer and entered data on my oldest-by-one-minute senior. I picked a tux shot and one casual straddle-the-chair shot, put it in my shopping cart and switched to senior number two. I did the same and went to my shopping cart and what did I find? Nothing. An empty cart. Nada. What the heck happened?
After wasting a good ten minutes trying to get the silly cart to load, I called for help.

Buffy answered.

Buffy not only helped me with the two pictures per senior, she helped me with the Perfect Package where you get exactly what you want. Buffy and I have so much in common. She doesn’t have three dogs but she has a great dane and four kids, too. One of her kids went to modeling school and she doesn’t think it’s a bad idea for mine. We spent several hours together picking out just the right shots for each of the three eight-by-ten collages. I can’t wait to get the cd with all eighty-one pictures so I can make any copies I want of my kids. After all, they may or may not leave us with an empty nest at the same time.

Oh shoot. I’ve still got to get that senior page done. Which of these pictures should I add?