My Swiss Miss

Yesterday my friend Mark and I took Ruby to Walmart to get her Xmas portrait done. Usually I avoid Walmart like the plague (a gross, unhealthy, over-Americanized plague), but Mark and I have made it a tradition to take Roo to the Wally for the portrait. My main reasoning for this is because it's so flippin' cheap -- a package of 42 prints is only $19.95, and this includes the sitting (this is by no means meant to be an advertisement for Walmart). Of course, they don't give you a choice in which shot qualifies for the special and they take a bunch more which they later try to sell you for 10 times the price. But I do like the general cheesiness of the whole process and Mark enjoys his role as art director/Ruby wrangler.

What you see above is the dress that we chose as Ruby's costume. It came with a box of family heirloom hand-me-downs that Aaron's aunt Bobbie (the mother of the next youngest kid in our clan, Aaron's five-year-old cousin Maren) gave me after Ruby was born. I have no idea how old it is -- I've seen pictures of Aaron's 31-year-old sister wearing it when she was about Ruby's age, but it might date back farther to Aaron's aunt, who's about 50. Either way, it was made in Italy and it's absolutely beautiful.

As I very secretly predicted, the actual photo session was a bit of a bust. Ruby was fine and was sitting in front of the Swiss village background that Mark selected as the photographer set up her equipment. Right before she was ready to start snapping, Roo had a big freak out and refused to sit. We did everything we could to please her, including a walk through the hardware section of the Walmart. She continued her refusals. Finally, we bought a package of shortbread cookies and bribed her. She sat there, on the photo platform, happily chomping away, but would cry whenever she was without cookie in hand. So all of the photos feature Ruby holding a cookie and wearing a wide crumb-covered grin. I think they're pretty cute and will provide an suitably embarrassing story once she's older. Ha.