I confess...

I confess I am the worst documentarian of my childrens' experiences and milestones. While I do take pictures of special occasions like birthday parties and Christmas morning, I usually only take a couple of shots and call it a day. I'm so bad even tried to shoo away the nurse who wanted to take a picture of me holding my oldest moments after she was born. Does this make me a bad mother?

For example, today was my oldest's "Moving Up Day" from kindergarten. The kids stand on the risers, sing a few songs and get a little certificate saying they finished kindergarten (the fact that everything these days requires a ceremony, certificate, or trophy is a topic for another day). You would think with the amount of photographic and video equipment in that auditorium that these kids were graduating from Harvard with the secret of cold fusion instead of from kindergarten with the ability to count to fifty. I had to tap the woman in front of me and ask her to sit down so intent was she on capturing every second of this momentous occasion.

Three things factor into my lax attitude about chronicling my kids lives. First, will they really care if there's one picture or fifty? I remember looking through boxes of pictures my parents took and, really, one would have been enough. Where are all these snaps now? Gathering dust in my dad's basement. Second, do we really need to make everything in kids' lives such a big freaking deal? Save the media onslaught for the big events like graduation (I mean high school) otherwise when your kid successfully takes a dump he's going to wonder where the paparazzi are. Third, I am too busy living my life to worry about recording it. It want my kids to have memories of being with their mother rather than the memory of some woman with their mother's voice and body trilling, "Look over here!", her face obscured by a camera.

So, no I won't be that mom at the school play jockeying for the best position to shoot video or telling my kids, as they roll their eyes, "Just one more picture", on their way to prom. I'm too busy experiencing these life events. But, I will, of course, give you my e-mail so you can forward me any pics you took.*

*My eternal gratitude to those cameraphiles whose skills I have benefited from through the years. Without you I'd have about five pictures of each of my kids.