Carpool Candy: Say Cheese?

I spent 30 chaotic minutes this week in the South Orange Middle School gym as my six-year-old had pictures taken for his baseball team. If you have ever been to a children's sports photography shoot, you know that they are as organized as a two-year-old's finger paint canvas. No one knows where to go—this one lost his hat—that one has only one sock—and only a third of the parents there have filled out their forms.

So, as I stood in line with the other frustrated adults, dripping with whiny, hungry children (it's usually called right in the middle of dinner time), I wondered why I bothered at all. I take pretty good pictures myself. I attend practically every game and take action shots of my kids swinging a bat, making a catch, or getting dirty in the dugout. My prints are a hundred times more captivating than a staged headshot with a fake background.

And how hard is it to gather the team together following a game to get a group shot? (OK, maybe it is a bit like wrangling sheep but you get the picture!)

Yet every year, I fork over at least $17 for four mediocre pictures of my kid in uniform. I have three kids who all play soccer, and two who play baseball, so that's five sets of unnecessary phony flashes at a minimum of $85—in just this year alone.

Why do we do it? It certainly isn't to have a professional shot of my kids to remember what they looked like at every adorable and awkward stage of development. That's what school pictures are for. Those cheesy mugs are a rite of passage. You want to be able to look back at yourself and remember who was in your class each year, and, of course, what trendy outfit you wore.

I still have my baby book filled with wallet-sized shots of me all dressed up, sporting a gap-toothed grin or poofy hairdo. (Oh, if you could only see the one from second grade with my large, pointy-collared plaid dress. Or later in a whale turtleneck and headband. Classic.)

In the past, we have purchased the sports packages so we could send the prints and trading cards to our out-of-town relatives. But when it's so much easier and more efficient to email pictures and/or share them on a photo site, snail mail seems like a colossal misuse of time.

So if taking the sports pix are not for nostalgic or family reasons, aren't they just another example of needless waste?  

Do we really need another set of stilted portraits sitting in our drawers when we have better shots of sliding into third, or faces dripping with chocolate ice cream after the game? Those are the ones that capture the moment and make you smile.  

We are down to the minimum—Package E—these days and we've learned to avoid the trading cards, mouse pads, and bobble heads. I would skip it altogether but my husband, who usually coaches, needs to be there to pose, so we often wind up getting sucked into a package through a combination of peer pressure and guilt.

We happily ordered the most decadent packages for our oldest son, won over by the newness and the sight of him in that adorable outfit and his miniature cleats. But now the excitement has worn off and the idea seems like a silly extravagance.

Maybe every team can start a sharing website at the beginning of the season. I would volunteer to take a team picture and email it to all the parents on the team. If every team could find one volunteer to do the same, we could use all that extra money towards something more valuable to the sport like fixing the fields, improving equipment, or contributing to a fund that covers the seasonal costs for those in the community who can't afford it.

Call me negative, but I think there are better ways to spend our money and time. So, we are going to shake things up like a Polaroid picture and just say no to sportography—next year.