great tip I found on facebook

This tip comes from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department:

CHILD SAFETY TIP

Before departing with children/grandchildren/kids to any event, take a second, pull out your cell phone and take individual pictures of each child. That way, if the unthinkable happens and a child gets lost, you have a picture of how they are dressed and what they looked like that day. the photo can then be immediately sent to police to aid in locating the child. Seconds can be precious in this scenario, so take a second, make it a habit, and take a picture.

We try to take a "group"picture whenever we take volunteers into the desert for a working party. Hard to get individual pictures of everyone, but they seem to hold still for a group shot. We eventually post the picture on the internet for all to see, but the real reason we take it is to identify someone who comes up missing.

When teaching survival, I frequently do this drill. I have someone that was rather unknown to the group, come forward for some reason, just for a moment or so. Then they quietly move out of sight.

About 5 or 10 minutes later I ask the group to describe the person. It is always interesting. Seldom correct.

Nomad

This tip might be old news to a lot of people here, but it is simple things like this that intrigue me the most. It's one of those "smack my head and wonder why I hadn't thought of that before" moments.

Thank you for the tip. I have already forwarded it to some friends. Indeed, this tip seems so obvious in hindsight, but it wasn't obvious really. I never thought of it. Along the same lines, there's usually some annoying little kid in the group who's walking around taking thousands of pics. Actually, it's more like cute, but sometimes it's annoying when they're candid shots. Anyway, I will be encouraging the kid from now on to make sure to get a bunch of pics of everybody in the group.

Great idea! I lost my son in Toys R Us for about three and half minutes when he about 5 and I have to admit, "What was he wearing?" is a lot harder question than it seems when you're in a high stress situation.

Yeah, most days I don't pay much attention to what DS is wearing specifically, just that he's wearing something appropriate and NOT the clothes he wore yesterday. Then there are days like today when DW and DS leave the house extra early before I have to get up.

When my girls were young and before we had a pool I would take them to a near by park with small swimming pond/beach.

My girls had blonde hair yet when wet all the kids hair looked the same . So to help keep and eye on MY kids I would put bright hair ties on them .

The photo is a very good thing to do, I've found I often had trouble remembering what they were wearing when we went places.

My wife's nephew has a 3 year old son of whom the kid's grandmother has taken a zillion photos. On a trip to the beach last summer Nana was being her usual paparazzi-self. Upon leaving one store mom noticed that the boy did not have his hat on. By looking thru all of Nana's photos they figured out in which store and where in the store he had left the hat.

The hat was recovered and the day saved.

Darn good idea in the OP.

Andy

I do this at every public event. Two pix. Kid, kid's shoes.