I have 16 hours of PALS over the next two days. That’s the acronym for Pediatric Advanced Life Support. Does it sound intimidating to you too? Advanced LIFE SUPPORT? As in knowing how to take care of a child in an emergency situation that is trying to die right in front of you? Because I for one am intimidated, and I have to pass this class in order to work in the Trauma Room. Let me tell you folks, this shit is hard, yo!
(Completely unrelated to the above paragraph but seriously? Still funny.)
Tonight we bought a couple of picture frames for Kevin’s office, so he could have something beautiful (that means me Avelyn) to look at while sitting in his prison gray, windowless office. It got me thinking that in theory I finally have the time to go through the last (almost) eighteen months of photos sitting on my hard drive and print out tons of pictures to frame and store in albums. I swear, the digital camera has to be one of the best inventions in my lifetime thus far, but taking the time to weed through all the crap photos to get to the good ones is incredibly time consuming.
While I haven’t officially started the weeding out process, I did take a moment to notice something about my picture taking activity. Namely, it’s waned.
I remember a time when I couldn’t go a day without snapping off 75 photos. It seemed like the thing to do lest I forget what that one tiny, oh my god it is growing, her hair is actually GROWING AS WE SPEAK, hair on her head looked like RIGHT THEN, RIGHT NOW!
I couldn’t imagine a world where parents didn’t take 75 photographs a day of their child. They must be terrible parents! I’m sure I was thinking. They must not love their child half as much as I love mine! Look at the pictures! The sheer number of pictures!! Digital! Picture!! OVERLOAD!!!!
“Hello, my name is Jennifer and I’m a photo-aholic.”
Keep in mind the above numbers are the leftover numbers. The pictures that made the first round cut. The ones that weren’t completely blurry, cut off, too dark, too light, too something to keep around for a second review. I’ve deleted hundreds of pictures and still have hundreds to go. That’s the downside to the digital camera; at some point you have to go back through and only keep the ones you really need. It’s an exhausting endeavor. But one I finally have time for!
What is really cool about having all these photos is that I can look back and see Avelyn, my baby, changing right in front of my eyes.
Can it be that this is the same sweet girl that came exploding, literally, out of my body just 17 months ago? Seventeen months ago I would never have imagined how beautiful, funny and smart that 6 pound baby would be. If you had told me I could love her more seventeen months later I would have told you to shut up, that it would not be possible for me to love her anymore than I already did. But I do. And my heart just aches it is so full of love.
I can look at that graph above and remember exactly why there are more or less photos every month. Maybe we went to Chicago, or it was Christmastime, I moved Avelyn to San Antonio to live with Kevin (who, ahem, sucks at taking regular pictures), Avelyn turned ONE, I moved back to SA, Chicago again, and now I am so unbelievably busy I can’t seem to find the camera let alone snap some photos. It’s September 21st and I’ve got 40 in the bank. Way to go Bad Mom.
Coincidentally it would have been my Dad’s 54th birthday today. That means he’s been gone for 15 years now. I think if he were still around I might have gone through some photos earlier and sent him a huge bundle. He would of liked that I think.
I see little bits of myself in Avelyn’s face sometimes, and I see a little of my Dad when the light hits her just right. So far my mom says she at least has his giant boat feet. Did I tell you we bought her some new shoes last week? Did I tell you they are size 7? SEVEN. As in my seventeen month old wears size SEVEN shoes. If you don’t believe how big her feet are I will prove it with the picture below.
What can I say? Like mother, like daughter.
I have box upon box of photos from when I was kid.
I’ve decided that my daughter will get an external hard-drive when she grows up and on it will be stored (by date and event) all her pictures.
Granted, I still print some but not near as many as my Mom did.
This is the greatest idea I’ve ever heard. “Happy wedding dear daughter, here is your life in microchip form!”
I LOVE your graph! There just aren’t enough good graphs in this world.
I hear ‘ya on the picture taking. Although my pictures are not nearly as grand as yours. But this night time working thing has pretty much killed my picture taking mojo. Poor kids, they’re going to look back at their lives and try to explain to their shrinks that their mother was just horrible because they don’t have any pictures from June 2009-whenever and thus have no idea what life was like; therefore it must have been horrible. All my fault.
Another side note-totally got to watch someone get saved last night. He started having a heart attack while getting an EKG. It was amazing.
Isn’t it? I think being there when someone LIFE is being saved is the most amazing thing I’ve ever been apart of. Completely humbling.
I think the first month we were home I took about 500 pictures…literally! I’m a slacker at the daily photo shoots that we used to have. But I’d much rather sit and read books and play ball and oh yeah, eat! BUT, I do miss the daily Hobo fix that we once used to get via photos ( :
17 months – where DID the time go…
I’m a pictureaholic too!!! (Like you didn’t know that!) How do you get a picturegraph??? I want one!!!
There are a bajillion pictures living in my computer, so many that I have less than 20 gigs of hard drive space left (yikes!) but very few actually printed. I need to work on that. Sigh. It’s really hard to pick which ones you want to print and send to albums. I like Snapfish for that though! I have actually pronted the first 6 (?) months worth, they just of course are not in albums yet. I’m going to have so many albums, because they don’t make albums big enough.
Brooklyn just started wearing size 4 shoes this month, but I think some of them are already starting to feel a bit small. That is absolute craziness.
Hey, my dad’s birthday is today too. What a coincidence. I am thinking of you as I know you are thinking of him.
I made the graph in Excel. Because I’m awesome and addicted to charts and graphs.