Photo Search

I’ve been going through our photos and there are boxes and boxes of them from the time my husband and I were dating until W. was 3 and R. was 5 years old.

Then they stop. There are very few photos of my kids as big kids. There are the school plays and the big occasions but I’ve concluded that we stopped documenting our kids’ lives when they hit kindergarten.

Some of this is because we’ve gone digital so we don’t store our photos in boxes anymore. They are on discs or in Iphoto. But still, there are surprisingly few photos of our life with the older boys.

This reminds me of my parents who took a ton of photos of me, the oldest, as a baby. Then a lot of photos of Ben, the next olderst, fewer of Alex, the third in line and a very few of Tony, the youngest.

Fortunately, we have friends who take photos of plays and playdates or we might have very little to show our own kids. The kids themselves also take photos but this can sometimes mean 100 pictures of the gecko and three of themselves or other relations

I don’t know what I can tell my kids when they ask us what happened after they left toddlerhood. Did the camera break? Well, yes, a couple of cameras did. Did we lose interest? No. We just got out of the habit. If they say, “That’s lame,” I’ll have to agree.

So, I’m a little sad about all those undocumented moments. I can tell myself that we were too busy living to stop and take a picture but that will be small comfort when I want to look back at my children’s 10th birthdays only to find that we didn’t take any photos. Sigh.

So, my new resolution is to start taking more pictures, even if I have to borrow my son’s camera to do it. As Simon and Garfunkle say in “Bookends: “Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.”