I am that mom! The mom that will take my kids to a photographer once or twice a year; the mom that will snap a millions pictures when my kids have anything with slight importance. Lost a tooth: PICTURE. Learned to sing a song: Video. Ate your first piece of broccoli: Picture.
I know that I probably sound a little crazy or slightly overbearing, but bear with me for a second and hear me out. Today I am 31 years old and in the thirty one years I have been on this planet I have lost my mother, father, brother, favorite aunt, best friend and countless other friends and relatives. I am not looking for sympathy, but I tell you this so that maybe you can understand why I am the way I am. There is a never ending fear that I may lose someone important to me. It never goes away, every unexpected phone call, every knock on my door my stomach sinks a little and I think the worst. This is something that will probably never change and I have accepted it, SO … I take a million pictures, kiss and hug my children every single time they leave my sight and I pray A LOT.
I am not telling you to take the pictures for fear of losing someone. But let’s all be honest for a second, our children grow so very, very fast. The way they looked on the day they were born is not the way they looked at 2 weeks old. It is not possible for me to remember every forehead wrinkle or crooked little smile they once had, so I try to take pictures and videos so I can hear their sweet little voices when they were two or see the way their hair curled when they were one.
It is completely understandable that not everyone can afford a photographer for family portraits once a year, but there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with phone pictures or pictures you take yourself. Half the pictures hanging on my walls are ones my husband or I snapped on a random day. With life happening, it is easy to forget what our little ones looked like 5 years ago, so I plead with you to take the picture. I pray that one day when they are in college or getting married, you can look back at that sweet photo of them covered in spaghetti sauce and you can cry and laugh because that picture will take you back to that very moment in time. I have always believed that photos and videos are like a mini time machine. A picture can instantly take you back to the way you felt in that moment or to a memory that had been buried in your subconscious.
We lost my brother very unexpectedly and I remember going through all of the boxes of polaroids and school photos and laughing and crying, remembering all of the moments we shared through those silly photos. My husband and I always talk about what we would grab in a flood/ fire, and I ALWAYS say the pictures. Of course in this day and age, so many can just be re-printed because they are digital and how lucky our children are to have access to memories at their fingertips.
My husband often tells me to just live in the moment and of course I do. However, I don’t think he understands that in 10 short years our oldest daughter will be an adult. She will no longer ask me to brush her hair or to help tie her shoes, and all of those little moments that make up her life will no longer be just for us to share with her.
