Photo album politics

Disclaimer: I'm wine buzzed right now. Bear with me.

A and I are heading to Indianapolis tomorrow to house warm with his brother and celebrate his/our brother-in-law's birthday (his sister's husband) and Father's Day all at once. As a still relatively new member of the family (aside from being the slightly awkward girlfriend for a while), the whole "bundle o' celebrations" is a new concept. Considering I come from a family where a phone call and a three-month-late, $20 gift card to Best Buy suffices as birthday observance, it's still new to me.

For my birthday last month, A's brother got me a photo album for Punky Photos. I love it, it's adorable, and it's about 25% filled now with adorable pictures of my needlessly adorable daughter. So I thought that I'd bring it along, not only to upstage her 4-month-her-senior, much-less-cute cousin, but also to show BIL that I appreciate the gift. Plus, come on, you've seen the pictures. She is ridiculously cute. On a scale of 1-10, she's throat-punchingly cute.

So I'm not a huge fan of A's BIL, husband of A's sister (I guess he's my BIL now too, but either way -- he's non-blood BIL, or NBBIL). Neither is A. It's a lot of long stories and long-standing resentments, but whatever, the guy's sort of a pretentious prick, and doesn't fit into the family like the other *cough cough* in-law child. Everyone sees through his pretentious charade except A's sister, who happens to be married to and have (admittedly cute but not as cute as mine) children with him.

Okay, okay, enough with the backstory. I have the photo album and filled it with pictures of Punky and her birth and development, including being held by various family members. But I conspicuously left out a certain member of the "family" holding her. Ah yes, NBBIL. But because I want to bring the photo album with me tomorrow, and because I don't know who will look at it, I'm faced with the quandry.

I have to put the picture of NBBIL holding her in the photo album. I just have to. I can't ignore his presence at her birth now. I don't have intravenous drugs to allow me to ignore him now. So I have to put his picture holding her in the album. But I can't just stick it at the end of the current four months' worth of photos either, because then that just screams, "I kind of think you're a dick and this picture's presence in the album is only temporary." No, I have to put it in its chronological place.

So I take out one of the many gratuitous fresh-out-of-the-womb pictures of Punky with a picture of NBBIL holding her. (For the record, he was the only family member that she cried while being held.) But then I'm forced to further acknowledge him with a caption. All the other photos around this photo place have a caption "Punky and Aunt A" and "Punky and Uncle C" -- so now, NOW!!! I must give this photo the caption of "Punky and NBBIL" or else it just looks like, 'Hey, we are only sticking this picture here temporarily, therefore are not giving it a caption because we don't want your picture in our album for all posterity!'

And so, I have to caption the photo. And now, because of photo album politics, I now forever have a picture of Punky and NBBIL in the photo album even though it was never my intent. This would all be so much easier if NBBIL wasn't so unfortunate-looking, plus it's a bad picture of Punky (who is newborn and weird looking AND screaming). One day I hope to look at this photo album with her and remind her, "That's your uncle NBBIL. Don't worry. you're not related by blood."