Paparazzi Parents

Perhaps it was the severe lack of photos in my own childhood that caused me to go overboard when I had my first child. We had been taking photos of Diego the second he was born. My husband and I took Lamaze classes so he would be allowed to be with me in the delivery room. To support and comfort me, of course, but basically to make sure someone took photos of THE event.



The lengths we would go to for that perfect photo op. In my case, it was foregoing any anesthetic. Hehehe. But seriously, natural child birth was the perfect choice for me and my family for much more relevant reasons. (This is one of my first layouts using acid free materials - June 2006. I am currently in the middle of transferring my photos from magnetic albums to photo-safe scrap albums. I know the layout is not perfect (yet), but the baby certainly is.)

We took a lot of pictures of the baby sleeping, sneezing, sleeping, all the momentous firsts, crying, laughing, smiling. And because at the time I STILL DIDN'T KNOW ANY BETTER, I mounted the photos on bigger magnetic albums. Between parenting and working though I didn't really have time to add captions but at least (or so I thought) the pictures where safe and organized chronologically.

We have had two more children since then so you can imagine the number of photo albums I have to get back to and work on "when I had the time." It's funny though, that by the second child, we seemed to be taking less pictures. And her photos were not put in the albums as diligently as the first-born's. Hmmmm...I heard it said that most parents experience this photo-fatigue at one time or the other.

Things changed when our youngest was born in 2002 and I bought my very first digital camera. Wow! You can take all the photos you want and then choose the best for developing and store the rest in your computer. You can also preview your shots as you take them. No more guesswork and no more waiting to know if you got that exact shot you were aiming for. How cool is that? Sadly at that time, it was still quite expensive to have digital prints developed so again, I still have quite a backlog of photos to scrap. I am about 18 years (computed by adding my kids' ages: 8+6+4) behind. That's almost half my lifetime. And in the meantime, we're taking more pictures. It just keeps piling up!

But I will get to that all in good time. Besides, taking photos is only half the fun.

Meanwhile, I continue to be a paparazzo - fully equipped with both digital and video cameras. And I am not alone in this world. In the photo below, my co-parents and I rushed to take the front row seats at our children's graduation program. When the emcee announced that we could now take the photographers' row, there was a whoosh and a flurry of activity as we all hurried to get the best seats in the house. Our own children were more disciplined than we were actually. I half expected mommies and daddies to fight over the seats. Hahaha.


Expectant parents. Our children are all celebrities in their own right, aren't they?