Among the stunning submissions we received — siblings staring lovingly into each other’s eyes, little ones with their closest furry friends, and freshly-minted parents admiring their newborns — one submission was altogether different and it came in with the subject line, “Greatest family photo of all time.”

Sounds like an exaggeration, right? But really, in a funny way, it was pretty accurate.

Dominating the foreground is a less-than-happy toddler named Andy. He’s 18 months old in the shot, uncle Mike Pierantozzi explained over email, and is surrounded by eight of his nine cousins — newborns to almost-teens. The photo, taken by Pennsylvania photographer John Secoges, was meant as a Christmas present for Andy’s grandparents, Pierantozzi says, but Andy wasn’t having it. “No manner of coaxing — lolli-pops, stuffed animals, bribery or begging — could get him to stay in the photo, so we just went with it.”

Hoping for a more conventional final product anyway, the family opted to take things into their own hands: “for the final shot, we had to Photoshop Andy’s head from a picture that was snapped the one millisecond he wasn’t completely apoplectic,” Pierantozzi writes. This was the (slightly more civilized) result: