Two weeks ago I published nine rules for School Picture Day. Confidently. One of them even ended with “I will not be taking questions.”
But, guys, I (obviously?) fumbled the bag. The universe was not going to let this moment pass without my Sex and the City bus-splash moment.
OK, here’s what’s in this roll:
The nine Picture Day rules I published, and how I broke all of them before 8am
The only photograph I got that morning, which is of the wrong child
Six Pics for October: six photo prompts, and the one that’s free forever
What a month of these actually looks like, with your photographs in it
What you told me about posting your kids’ faces online
I was so sure I was going to nail this. I prepared as much as a person can prepare. No logos, no neons, no orange. Everything laid out the night before. I blow-dried my daughter’s hair, which is a special treat and takes forever on her Rapunzel hair. I set the alarms. I did it all right.
Then everybody woke up.
Everyone seemed mad. There was something sticky in my daughter’s hair. She wanted an outfit with complicated layers. My son refused the shirt he had absolutely approved last week, in favor of one that was deeply not special and had a giant stain on it.
We left late. We truly almost missed the bus. I floored it to the stop, and my neighbor stood there blocking the bus while my kids ran for it.
And I did not take a single photograph. Not the doorway shot I had told you was the one thing that actually fixes picture day. Nineteen years of being paid to make sure other people’s families have the picture, and I have nothing from my own kid’s.
Well. Almost nothing. There is exactly one photograph in my camera roll from that morning. It is of my third child. Whose picture day it was not.
Sometimes you do everything right, and there are just no clicks. Even at my house.
There are weeks with no photos of my kids at all. One of their birthdays is six blurry frames and nothing on my “big camera”. The gap in my archive looks exactly like the gap in yours.
But here’s what I want to say about that, because it’s why I keep doing this anyway.
I missed the photograph I planned. I did not miss the rest of the week.
I snagged a click of a shadow on my bathroom window that looked so exactly like a cartoon bug from A Bug’s Life that I went outside to check. It was a dried leaf in an uncannily bug-y shape.
And that one photo of my third child? She’s holding the toy horse she calls Cow. It’s… a paint horse? Honestly, very cow-like. She is a thought leader.
The Elodie and Cow photo wasn’t planned. It exists because the noticing practice was still running in the background while the plan fell apart.
Nobody has a perfect success rate. What a photo prompt practice gives you is a floor. I know that because on the mornings I get it completely wrong, I still come away with something, and only because I’ve taught myself to be a person who pays attention to weird little perfect things.
Basically, the big-occasion days get ample photo coverage, until they don’t. That’s the morning the boring-day photos pay for.
I had to go outside to check that I wasn’t hallucinating a cartoon bug.
Why it’s so hard to photograph your own life
It’s too overwhelming. You already have no time, and now you’re supposed to work out how to make your life more artful on top of everything else.
It is so much easier to get your dopamine on your phone. This week, my zone-out was extremely specific: I wasted a magical amount of time hearting every account that so much as mentions Julianne Moore’s townhouse in Architectural Digest, and then spending thirty-eight minutes curating the perfect meme for each of the eleven people I know will reply.
So even though you genuinely want to make something beautiful out of your ordinary days, it’s too hard to know where to start. Or to remember to start.
No amount of intending to be more present stops the phone from winning.
So instead of waxing poetic at you about becoming a different person, here’s what I’m actually after. I want you to be the same person, with a prompt sitting in the back of your eyeballs, triggering you to behave differently.
A prompt is a small thing. You read it once, it floats around in your brain, and then it surfaces at precisely the right moment. A moment you would otherwise have walked straight past.
Here’s how that actually works. I’d been thinking about shadows for weeks, marveling at the ones readers sent me last month, trying to engineer my own, without any fab results.
Then I was swapping bookshelves around, and every book in the house was on the floor for ten minutes. My daughter sat down in the pile and started reading one. I looked down, and the sun was hitting the open pages.
Was my phone in my back pocket? Oh my God, it was.
I didn’t make that sunbeam happen. But I had been carrying the idea of it around long enough to recognize it when it shone in.
What a month of photo prompts actually looks like
Fewer people sent me a photograph of their child than I expected, and I understand exactly why. It feels personal to share your kids online.
What people sent instead were shadows and cool light, shoes by a door and backpacks, and the best thing ever: messages telling me they’d started looking at their own houses differently.
The looking, it turns out, is the thing I was actually after.
October Photo Prompts for Parents
Six photos to take this month. Do all six, do two, do one.
1. THE CURRENT RELIGION.
There is one thing in your house being worshipped right now. A chicken stuffie. A particular pair of shorts. A song played forty times a day. A snack that must be served in the correct bowl or the day is over. You know exactly which one it is, because your days have been reorganized around it.
Photograph the object, not the kid. And photograph it where it actually lives, which is probably somewhere hilarious. The middle of the hallway?
The test for whether you’ve picked the right one: it comes to dinner, or it gets whined about, or both.
Craft tip: don’t move it, and don’t tidy around it. Where it lives is half the information. If it’s wedged into a shoe by the front door, photograph it wedged into a shoe by the front door.
Why do this: in six months it will be gone and nobody will mention it again. In ten years they will deny it ever happened. A date stamp tells you when. This tells you what Fall 2026 felt like.
Mine: a paint horse named Cow, owned and operated by a two-year-old. It comes to dinner.
And if you have no time at all, here is the two-second assignment: take a screenshot of your kid’s favorite song. Open Spotify, find the one they have played into the ground, screenshot it, drop it in the family album.
My daughter’s is “Drag Me Down” by One Direction. What can I say, she has incredible taste.
Next year you will scroll past the photo of that song title and go “ohhhhhh yeah, they loved this!” and the assignment is done in four seconds.
This version tells you what Fall 2026 sounded like.
No kids? Same rules, you have one too. Scroll back and find the thing you photographed eleven times this month without noticing. Did you grow your own cucumbers? Are you fascinated with fringe? Did you decide to do no-buy Fall with a focus on vintage clothing and furniture? You do yours, and hit reply!
That brings us to the end of Prompt 1.
The other five photo prompts include a close-up where nobody has to smile, the thing you’re about to give away without realizing it, and one about the people who love your kid when you aren’t the one holding them.
The Six, my photo prompts series, becomes paid this month. One of the Six prompts stays free every month, forever.
Eight dollars gets you the other five, the Chat, early access to shoot dates, and the long how-to issues.
I’d like to fill next month’s issue with your photographs instead of only the Six Pics that are mineeee. I truly want to see what you come up with!
And now, to the latest poll!
Do parents post their kids’ faces online?
I asked. Seven of you voted, which is small enough that I’m giving you counts instead of pretending they’re statistics.
Four post carefully. Two post and wish they hadn’t started. One never has and isn’t going to.
Nobody picked “yes, freely.” Not one person.
I’m not building a thesis on seven votes. But nobody in this room is relaxed about posting their kids online, and two of you are actively regretting a decision you made about a baby who is now old enough to have an opinion.
Which is why I spent September changing how the series works. There are three places for your photo prompt photos now, and you pick.
Just your phone. The archive nobody sees. Most of The Six lives with you.
The Chat. Paid subscribers only, starting this month. It’s smaller, and it’s a known thing. It is not a vault, it’s still the internet, and you should only put something in there you’d be fine having seen by a few people who paid to be in the room. I won’t promise more than that because it wouldn’t be true.
But it’s a different thing than posting your kid to the whole internet. And the encouragement from others is a delighttt!
#odetotheordinary. Public! No faces required, no relationship with me required. Tag it and I’ll come find it!
And Scene.
So.
I still don’t have a photograph of my son on his picture day. I’m never going to. That morning is gone, and no amount of planning would have saved it, which I know for a fact because I planned it.
What I have instead is a dried leaf that looked like a bug, a two-year-old holding a horse named Cow, and a week with a not-empty camera roll.
In fifteen years, my kids are going to decide what their childhood felt like, partly from whatever happens to be in front of them. That’s a strange amount of power, and I’d rather use it on purpose than by accident.
Two out of six is a good month. I mean that as the actual standard and not as encouragement.
Start with the free one. If you’re tired, do the song screenshot. It takes four seconds.
And if this resonated, heart the heart!
hugs!! Ana
p.s. If you shot a first-day-of-school photo in September, did you also stick it in an album somewhere? Make sure you can find it in ten seconds. Perhaps with a photo album named “YourKid // Kindergarten 2026-27”
And anything from this month you feel like sharing, tag it #odetotheordinary on IG and I’ll come and find it.
p.p.s. Bonus issue Thursday morning!
A collab with Lauren Levinson of Chef’s Kiss, who was a beauty and fashion editor for years, then a parenting one. Her range is wild: she’s interviewed an oculoplastic surgeon about brow lifts and a women’s coach about female friendships, and this week she asked me how to style a family photo shoot. She gets her readers discounts, too. Respect.
I kept it real. Wardrobe, shoot prep, and how to hook an annoyed kid back into the picture. Thursday the 15th!