Once upon a time, this blog was all words. When I started it, I didn’t have a digital camera I don’t think, or if I did, it was a very pathetic one. Nothing like the phone I carry in my pocket.
Tonight I read More Milly-Molly-Mandy to Smallest, and it was the chapter where MMM gets her picture taken. She has to go to a shop, where there’s a man with a huge camera, one of those boxes with a cover over it. And she has to go back the next day to collect the picture, and it costs her a shilling. I tried to explain this to Smallest, she wasn’t having any of it. She liked the idea of a picture printed out – she wants me to do it tomorrow from my phone.
It made me think about this technology that my children take for granted. All of them. Even Big, who ought to remember the differences, probably doesn’t really. She doesn’t remember film cameras, even though her first pictures were on film and she has a little printed album of those pictures.
I should do the same for each of the others, make them a book of their early days. Small might be the most difficult – I don’t know whether we have so many pictures of him, and if we do, where they are. I was never very good with cameras, and even now, a day like today, I can forget to take them. Looking through, they are mostly of Tigerboy or the garden, next to none of the larger children.
I must change that. I must make sure that every week at least there is a shot of each of them. Along with the words I record each Saturday, I’ll try to ensure there is a memories picture for each child. Sometimes it will be shared, sometimes they’ll have separate ones. But it’s important, I think, that each of them has a record.
And maybe, just maybe, once in a while I’ll get myself included in a picture. I remember that there are very few pictures of my mother from my childhood, and I think that’s because she didn’t like the camera. For me it’s because I’m usually behind it. I don’t like it, but I don’t mind it. But I’d like to be there, in the memories as well as in the words.
Do you put yourself in the picture?
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