For Old Times' Sake

I'm back with another out-of-order-Tahoe post.  (Hopefully, I'll have some actual beach pictures up here one of these days.)  

For the many, many years we vacationed in Tahoe as kids, we had a little Raley family tradition of getting those old-time photos taken.  You know, the kind where everyone dons Little House on the Prairie clothes, pretending to be slinging guns, robbing a bank, or "working" a saloon, and you get the photo in sepia print?  Well, we did this for the first time in Virginia City, Nevada, when Sara and I were about twelve years old, and Kyle was maybe ten and we continued every other year or so throughout our adolescence and beyond.  There's an embarrassing gallery of all of these shots up on a wall of Mop and Pop's house.  Even if I could pry those prints from their old-timey frames, scan them in and post them here, I absolutely would.not.do.that.  I need to maintain some shreds of dignity here.  

Instead, I'll just subject the girls to that everlasting sort of embarrassment, the kind that will forever and always be on the web...or whatever they'll call it in 20 years!  In order to do that, we decided to get one of these photos taken this year while my whole family was in Tahoe together.  Our Raley family is a teensy bit bigger now, with 8 grand kids 6 and under, and when we all traipsed in to the little photo shop in South Lake Tahoe, I'm sure the teen aged photographer/cashier shuddered a little.  There were a lot of little people to dress and get smiles out of! 

Pop, on the other hand, no matter how grumpy he looks here, loves this stuff!  

The girls got to work choosing outfits for themselves, and the photographer didn't mind at all if we broke the rules and snapped some pictures while everyone was getting dressed up.  These pictures are way cuter than the picture we came in there for ;)  Megan and Joey's cute cousin love knows no time boundaries!  Even in 1800's get-up, they still want to marry each other.

Of course, Bridget loved every minute of the dressing up!

And, what kind of western pictures would these be if we didn't get Annie with her gun? ;)

Even Mary got in on the action :)

Thanks to Mop and Pop for forcing us the great idea to keep this tradition going with the grand kids!  Do they look like they could possibly have 8 grandchildren?!  No way :)

The final result is sufficiently embarrassing, and will hopefully provide some good laughs when the girls are older.  Most embarrassing, though, is the PDA going on in the back row between Uncle Kyle and his then-girlfriend, who managed to spice up the background in the one photo (of course!) in which all of the kids are looking at the camera.  We'll have to get Sara on the task of doing some Photoshop work to rectify that, but in the meantime, here is the time-traveled version of our Raley family!

And, in the event that we start a gallery of our own one day, here is the first in our Stecher collection!