The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This past Saturday, April 19th, was, if nothing else, quite eventful for our family. We should have known better than to plan family pictures on the anniversaries of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Branch Davidian debacle in Waco, TX. But we’ve been trying to have family pictures for about a year now, and by that I mean outside playing at a park, etc., and nothing was going to stop us this time. Here’s how our day panned out.

Friday night commenced with snowstorms throughout the greater Seattle area. Not too promising for the following day pictures. Saturday morning we were up and about and greeted with off and on hail storms. Our appointment wasn’t until 2:00 PM though so we hoped it’d clear up by then. As our time approached we were in contact with our photographer, Shelbi, a friend of ours, and she advised that she was willing to brave a few hail storms for the chance at a few intermittent sunny periods. So off we went to meet her at the park.

When we got there we were greeted with a good 10-15 minutes of hailing, easily the longest “on again” of the day. We waited it out all bundled in our coats, and even started taking some pictures huddled under an umbrella, catching the tiny hail in our hands and/or mouths. It was all still pretty fun really. I think/hope we got some good pics of the boys.

After a while, the sun did finally break through so we took advantage of the situation, lost the coats, and posed for some family pics. All the coats and some photography equipment went on the bench and we sat on a towel in the grass. Took lots of photos there, then got up again and followed the boys around as they played, sometimes coaxing some photo ops out of them. We meandered around for a while until we got back into view of where we sat and I noticed that the bench was empty. I asked Angie, “Isn’t that where all of our stuff was?”

“No,” she replied, “our stuff is on another bench around the corner.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

After a few minutes of debate Angie wanted to go check it out. I stayed with the boys and Shelbi while Angie went to prove me wrong. A few minutes later she returned and confirmed that there were no other benches, that that had to be the bench where our stuff was. While we were off shooting pictures someone had come along and stolen all our stuff. My jacket, Angie’s jacket, both the boy’s jackets, and some minor photography stuff. We couldn’t believe it, especially since we’d seen virtually no one at the park that day. I mean, it was hailing and all, who in their right mind would be at the park at that time? We saw one guy walking his 2 good sized dogs, he wouldn’t have been able to carry it all if he wanted to and keep his dogs in grasp. One guy was out jogging the trails, and that was it. Luckily neither of us had anything important in our pockets. Wallets and keys were all either on us or with the stroller, which we promptly went back to retrieve and kept with us the rest of the day.

Neither one of us has ever really had anything flat out stolen from us before. It was really rather shocking to say the least. I’ve had my truck broken into before, but there’s nothing in there to steal so someone was very disappointed in their efforts there. This was just right out from under our noses though. We were right there the whole time and didn’t see or hear a thing. We choose to believe at this point that some poor homeless person needed our jackets much more than we did. If that’s the case, then so be it. We’re out maybe $50. Austin lost a couple of mini-cars in the process because Dad was holding them in his pocket. He was pretty upset when we told him what happened and that his cars were gone. I think they’ve been replaced already today though with a trip to the store.

So that was our Saturday afternoon. We went from the good – family pictures, to the bad – not the best weather, to the ugly – petty crime, all in one afternoon.