Millions of Pictures

As we're getting ready for a weekend of ultimate fun; choosing outfits, packing the diaper bag, making sure there's enough gas in the car, and putting fresh batteries in the camera, I found myself wondering why I feel the need to document my daughter's every move.

I must have at least 2,000 pictures of her on this very computer, and those are just the "keepers". I delete my camera at LEAST once a month, and hardly ever get around to printing the pictures, much less scrap booking them or even sticking them in the sleeves of a photo album. And after you have these millions of pictures, how often do you really look at them? As a self-proclaimed dweller, I actually go through photo albums a lot, but nobody else looks at my pictures!

Why then? Why take all these pictures to sit uselessly on our computers? To gather dust on a shelf sitting in an album? To smile blindly at the world in frames adorning our walls that no one actually stops to look at? Is it the new ease of digital cameras? Take as many pictures as you want, it only costs you for the few you print? Is it part of the American way of owning and having and proving oneself? "See how much I love my family, I have shelves of albums full of pictures of them!" Or for me, is it because there are so few pictures of myself growing up, that I want my daughter to be able to see what she was like at each stage of her life? Perhaps it's to prove to our kids that we DID do things with them, we DID take them places and have fun with them. To prove that they didn't have a horrible childhood, deprived on sunlight and joy.

For whatever reason I take SOOO many pictures (which means I'm only in about 20 photos WITH my daughter), sometimes I find myself resentful of watching my daughter grow up through a camera lens. Perhaps it's time to put the camera aside, get down and dirty with my daughter instead of taking pictures of her getting down and dirty, and cherish the memory in my mind's eye, physical evidence be damned. I'm sure I will take more than my fair share of pictures on our outings, but I will try to limit my cameras use, and take the moment instead, to simply enjoy the moment. Not every moment has to be a Kodak moment.