I have a confession to make. I'm one of those awful moms who doesn't send a kid to the mailbox without taking a picture. Baby 4 learned months ago to waddle up with a huge cheesy grin on his face whenever the silver cube comes out.
In my defense, I was like this before it was cool. I made a photo documentary of my AP English exam in high school and gave it to my teacher for the sheer joy of it. I know absolutely nothing about photography, I just find it awesome to take pictures and write commentary for them. Now that the annoying and costly step of film development has been removed, I'm completely out of control.
For a while I just took the photos and filed them on the computer under names I found terribly humorous. But in the selfless interest of keeping the distant grandparents in mind of our existence, I started a private family blog that gives me another excuse to take pictures of everything. Now taking pictures isn't just something I do for fun. It's for our family. It's full-on ministry. The grandparents love it now that they've got the sign-in figured out, bless their Boomer hearts.
We almost never get professional portraits of the kids because they're a huge rip, and why would we? I take 3000 pictures of them every week.
This experiment has yielded the benefit that our youngest kid will not be able to complain that there are tons of pictures of the older kids but none of him/her. When cost is not an obstacle, it's usually the baby who has the most pictures taken. They're just so darn cute, even when you've already had a bunch of babies move through.
It's weird how the photos make it look like we're just another one of those goofy, crazy families full of love and fun and good times. Maybe all those goofy, crazy families full of love and fun and good times have just as much fine and gross catastrophe raging between photos as we do? Could it be?
Will our kids have huge heads and think each trip up the stairs is worth preserving and sharing with everyone we know? I'm hoping the forms of deprivation to which we enjoy subjecting them will counterbalance it.
However, I do not have an illustrative photo for this post.
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6 comments:
I was thinking the same thing...I was trying to find baptism pictures of each of the kids...I have about 500 of the twins (I"m not kidding, there were four cameras clicking) and I have 1...yes...ONE of Andrew...who will be fourteen in June. And hey, we thought we had a gazillion photos of him!
I love digital photography and the ease of sharing our kids with distant family and friends! It makes me feel a bit less isolated here in flyover country!
You know what I need? I'm gonna tell you: A camera I can call with my phone.
It's like this: Something cute happens and I think, "TAKE A PICTURE!" But then the camera is hiding and before I can find it the cute passes and everything is lost.
But if I could CALL my camera, it would ring and be found and, oh! Everything would be preserved!
You know what else I need? A phone I can call with my camera.
>>It's weird how the photos make it look like we're just another one of those goofy, crazy families full of love and fun and good times.<<
Yes. Yes. Sometimes on nights when Dad's gone and I've finally wrestled the ferocious little dears into bed, I find that scrolling back through our family blog makes me not only able to face the thought of tomorrow, but maybe even to like them a little bit. Because their maddeningness is after all of the hilarious variety when seen through that magic lens.
Rebekah, if you ever get done using your brain, can I have it?
I just love the way you write.
Cheryl, hopeless CSPP groupie
From the other side:
In a past life, I raised a kid that was mine only in heart. He would roll his eyes when the camera came out. (pre-digital, but I worked at a film processing lab, so it all worked out) I had album after album of pictures of him and his dad, not anything "special", but they told the story of his life through my eyes. When that life became my past life, I left them. They were the story of HIS life, after all... His dad died a few years ago, and those albums were re-discovered way back in the closet where the Wicked Step-Mother had hidden them.
We looked back through them, and it's hard to believe that they document the every day real life of his childhood - the ordinary moments (like a trip to the mailbox, or "helping" me sew by unpinning the seams as I stitched, using his 10 year old boy hand as a pincushion, just because)...
My Notmykid is now expecting his own firstborn child and told me the other day that those photo albums are his most treasured material possession.
Cheryl, perhaps it will amuse you to learn that one of my most hopeless wishes is to be a real pianist. :P To add insult to injury: I could accompany to contemporary services adequately, but the hymnal and I just can't seem to make it work. Wah!
MM, good point. I remember one time my parents saying the things they'd miss most if we lost our material possessions were the photo albums.
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