Standing in the kitchen at the brink of dawn, I'm not quite awake, so I don't want the junior paparazzi capturing the moment. But I've grown accustomed to the photographs, so much so that I often don't notice them being taken any longer.
The pictures I take of our family are the life moments I want to remember, the "cute" ones: the first day of school, a baby with food all over his face, my two boys eating popsicles on the front step.
My husband takes amazing photographs of nature, including a pair of frog lovers preparing to bring new tadpoles into the waterways of College of Marin. He also photographs our boys, zoomed in with serious expressions or action shots of them riding their bikes.
I prefer the smiling ones.
For Christmas, my son received a digital camera with video function. I wondered if it was too advanced. But by his fourth birthday, he knew all the settings and could independently take pictures and videos, even viewing and deleting the ones he no longer wanted.
I'm intrigued by what captures my son's interest. Not exceptional events, but the ordinary moments of daily life. His favorite video subject is his trains. Sometimes the camera even takes a ride, videoing the whole trip.
My son also likes to run through the house with the video on, saying, "Here's my room, here's my brudder and heeeeere's Mama!" Pan to me, in my pajamas with major bed head. To my defense, it's only seven in the morning, but this is something I would not have chosen to capture on memory stick myself. Or the time he was videoing his trains, and you can hear me (quite clearly) talking on the phone about how I'd been having a hard time, but am thankfully feeling better now.
But this is life.
The hard times, the better times, the bed head. Why not preserve them along with the rest of the happy moments? My son even captured me scolding him and his brother in the infamous "train tracks in the potty" incident. The camera lay innocently on the floor, on video mode unbeknownst to me.
I will continue with my Kodak moments, and my husband and son will continue with theirs. Somewhere between the three, we're probably capturing a fairly accurate slice of our daily life.
Yesterday, my youngest son, who is only two years old, begged me to use the digital camera. I reluctantly handed it over, saying, "Be careful…"
While I wasn't looking, he somehow changed it to video mode and we now have a video of his dimpled feet performing with the kitchen cupboard as the backdrop. Then, a moment later, the camera dropped, thud, onto the floor. The video ends with me saying, "No more camera," and taking it away. The camera survived, but I realized it may be time for him to have his own camera.
With a fourth photographer in the family, we have one more perspective.
By Kristy Lund
Originally published in the Marin IJ, June 17, 2008: http://www.marinij.com/lifestyles/ci_9606904
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