Every time that my sister and I are at my parent’s house, we pull out our family photo albums and thumb through the pages and relive the memories of our youth. It’s funny to see old haircuts and exciting to see our favorite toys from decades ago. Anybody else embarrassed of their middle school photos?
Not long ago, I decided that I wanted to create photo albums for my family too. But instead of printing out each picture, my plan is to create a “family yearbook” that I’ll build using an online company. (You know the ones… you upload photos, add text if you choose, decide on the book size, add as many pages as you like, then they bind and mail you your creation.) Our family yearbook will have each two-page spread holding pictures for each week of the year. Then additional holidays, birthdays, and vacations will get their own two-page spread throughout the book as well. And thanks to the world of social media, I’ll copy and paste occasional blog posts with family stories, and have quotes from the kids scattered among the pages.
Now, if only I can make time to work on these projects….
Anyway, back to the photo albums at my parent’s house. One thing that I distinctly notice is the lack of pictures of my parents. There are a few scattered throughout the books, but mostly they are full of pictures of my sister and me. I do not want that to be the case for our family yearbooks. As a mom, we have a hard time turning over the camera. We want to capture everything and make sure that we get what we want in the photo.
I’m guilty of this. Big time.
When my girls are grown up, I want us all to be able to look through our pictures and see everybody in our family (including me… the mom) and remember the memories that we all shared. And as morbid as it sounds, I want my girls to have pictures of them with me and them with their daddy if something bad were to happen to one of us. I hate thinking thoughts like that, but it does creep into my mind.
Over the last year, I’ve tried reminding myself to give the camera to my husband to take pictures of me with our girls. And unfortunately, it’s not getting any easier for me to stop being our family photographer. But, I’ll continue to keep fighting that internal battle and hope to have a shelf full of family yearbooks filled with great memories that will be cherished forever!
How often do you get a picture with you and your kids? How do you preserve your family photos?
I am so guilty of this – even going as far as just keeping the camera away from my husband because he isn’t “doing it right.” LOL. Will work on this – thanks for the reminder.