As soon as I unzipped the backpack, I knew it wasn&rsquo;t going to be good. </p><p>There, nestled between the yellow folder with the smashed earthworm on the corner and the lunchbag with the half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich glued to the back of it with petrified Ho-Ho cream, was a white envelope. Immediately, I knew what it was. </p><p>School pictures.</p><p>I sighed, squinched my eyes shut tight, and mentally assessed how many boxes of Kleenex we have in the house.</p><p>I know what this means. I&rsquo;ll have to take last year&rsquo;s picture off the wall. And I know what happens when I take down last year&rsquo;s picture. I open the frame. And I put the new photo in front of the stack of past school photos and baby portraits. But I can never just put the picture back on the wall and walk away. </p><p>No, I just have to start humming Kenny Rogers (&ldquo;Through the yeeears&hellip;&rdquo;), put on a &ldquo;Steel Magnolias&rdquo; DVD, grab a truckload of tissues, and sit on the floor, flipping through every photo, from last year&rsquo;s dimple-smile second grade pose all the way back to his hospital nursery picture.</p><p>I can&rsquo;t help myself. These are no ordinary snapshots. You know, the scores of photos we all have of the kids at parties and beaches and hayrides, making horrible monster faces and putting bunny ears over one another&rsquo;s heads and holding Oreo cookies up to their eyes. </p><p>We have mountains of those kinds of photos. Once we took a week&rsquo;s worth of vacation photos, only to come home and discover that Speed Demon made a face &mdash; wide, staring eyes and mouth in an &ldquo;O&rdquo; &mdash; in every single one of them. On the same vacation, Teen Goddess decided it would be fun to maintain a chilling straight face in her photos. Fantastic. We looked like we were vacationing with Mr. Bill and a serial killer. </p><p>School photos are different. Their hair is combed so hard it&rsquo;s lined with comb tooth marks. Slicked with gel and glued with hairspray. Their faces have nary a trace of that morning&rsquo;s maple syrup. Scrubbed until you can count the freckles on their little noses. They&rsquo;re in ironed clothes and their necks have no leaves stuck on them.</p><p>And they&rsquo;re gazing into the camera all sweet and vulnerable and nervous and shy. Or sometimes confident and showy. Or sometimes just plain pretty.</p><p>These are our &ldquo;baaay-bies.&rdquo; Our sweet children.</p><p>These are not Mr. Bill.</p><p>Funny, I can&rsquo;t recall ever liking a school photo that was taken of me. My teeth always looked too big and gappy. My hair looked ratty or like a boy&rsquo;s. My smile was too shy or my eyes too wide. My shirt was dorky and my barrettes babyish. </p><p>But something happens when you&rsquo;re a mom and it&rsquo;s your kids&rsquo; school pictures you&rsquo;re looking at. You pull those photos out of the frame, one by one, and every one of them is a masterpiece. You can see his missing front teeth in the first grade shot. His smile is nervous in his kindergarten photo. His overalls were just too cute against the preschool winter backdrop. Your favorite is the one you had taken on a whim when you saw a sale as you were walking through the mall. His chubby little hands around a rubber duck in this one, a football in that one&hellip; Where did those chubby hands go? And the hospital photo. It&rsquo;s just so heartbreakingly adorable.</p><p>Here come the tears again.</p><p>And just when I think I finally have myself under control, another kid comes home with a backpack. </p><p>Great. Well, I&rsquo;ve already got the tissues out. Someone find my &ldquo;Terms of Endearment&rdquo; DVD.