7 Reasons Why School Picture Day Was The Absolute Worst

School pictures happen every year, but somehow we never were ready. Whether you wore the wrong dress, didn't brush your hair, or happened to have just lost a tooth, school pictures always turned into a contest of whose turned out worse.

Those big envelopes with the clear plastic windows were the most stressful delivery of the year. Your teacher would call your name and you would have to go to the front of the class and grab it, and hope that they wouldn't say anything about it when they handed it to you. You never wanted to be the person who had to go get re-shoots.

We all remember what it was like to get the pictures taken right?

Our moms would put us in our best party dresses or our pants with the fewest rips

They were going to spend way too much money on 30 wallet sized photos to send to all your grandparents and extended family, so you better look good.

We would struggle to stay clean until our picture time

If your class picture was after recess, forget it. You were absolutely going to be covered in playground dirt no matter how hard you tried to stay still.

Trying to smile on cue was always the worst

They would have you sit down so quick and yell a bunch of instructions, but the worst was that they expected us to have a natural smile that wasn't at all forced. And if your smile looked weird, you wouldn't know for weeks because it's not like it was instant.

That's not all we remember...

Not to mention the horrible poses they would put us in

"Tilt your head, not too far. Now lift your chin. Look to the left, your other left. Now hold these books, but make it look natural. No, I said natural. Now place one hand on this pillar. Not like that, the way you normally would. What do you mean you don't normally do this? Just, whatever, smile." We've all had this experience right?

Our hair was always in some kind of ridiculous style

Whether our moms had just braided it so tight that our faces looked like they may peel off, or we had just gotten a bang trim that turned them into an inch long fluff, it never looked great.

And what was with those backgrounds?

You can pick any background in the world, and you go with the same four options over and over again? To be honest, I always wished I had gotten the laser wall instead of the boring blue.

The group photo was always a terrible experience

Speaking as someone who was always the shortest in her class, it is annoying to constantly have everyone point it out every year. Yes, the short people get it, please stop discussing it. Other than that, I don't know how that photographer managed to get 30 kids to look at the same place at the same time. It's a true miracle.

Do you remember your horrifying school picture experiences?