Memory Making Outside the Digital Box

We are smack dab in the middle of a time of year that provides an abundance of memory making moments.  From the pumpkin patching, Halloween costuming of Autumn, to the Thanksgiving feast, into Christmas and Hanukkah to the grand finale of the New Year, the clicking of the parental camera can be heard nation wide.  

As a parent, I often find myself feeling frantic to capture every fleeting moment of my daughter’s childhood.  I consistently photograph her, and record much of it on our family blog.

What I have not done nearly enough of is to pull these images and memories out of the various digital boxes in which they are imprisoned and make them more accessible on either a wall or photo album.  After all, the point of taking a photo isn’t to put it on a flash drive or disk forever.  It’s to make a visual gallery to enjoy while not staring at a computer screen.

The reality of taking so many pictures is that it becomes overwhelming to not only organize them on the computer but to then select the images for printing and perhaps, one day, actually make it to the finish line of somehow displaying them in our physical surroundings.  I have a hard enough time editing the photos that I love.  Choosing a size, frame and place to hang the photo, well, there’s a reason why we have very few actual photos of our daughter hanging in our home. 

Because it takes me forever to print and display photos, I am so grateful for the ability to blog about our family and our daughter’s childhood.  Initially I set it up so that our family afar could be included in a consistent way on the latest and greatest with our baby girl.  Now it’s more of an on-line journal for me to memorialize the bazillion moments I never want to forget about this most precious journey.  Eventually, I hope that this blog will be fun for our daughter to read to learn about herself and about our perspective on her childhood. 

While I appreciate technology, I do not trust or love it all of the time.  I wonder about the blog site I use and if it will still be around when my daughter is old enough to appreciate it.  Should I be “backing” it up somehow?  A friend of mine, who also keeps a family blog, used Blurb to create a book out of the first 12 months of her son’s life taken directly from her blog.  It is beautifully designed and has all of the amazing photos and moments she recorded digitally in a lovely bound book.  I love the idea of accessing these memories in a tactile and solid form.  I envision sitting side by side with my daughter on the couch one day, warm drink in hand, paging through the book and casually walking down memory lane together.  No computer, no clicking, no internet connection required.

This same friend who introduced me to the idea of turning my blog into book form, also happens to be a photographer.  She has an amazing eye for design and has applied this talent to family memories.  Heather has beautifully fused her talent of photography and her love of design into one of the most stunning and beautiful memory walls I’ve ever seen.  Unlike a lot of us, she does not leave her images to gather dust inside her computer.  They are lovingly displayed on her living room wall and beckon you to them as soon as you enter her house.  As part of her photography business, Heather Perera Photography, she now offers her talent of photography display to others.  She will help you select photos, offer suggestions for framing and come to your home to brainstorm displaying your photographs.  This added service is a great option for those of us who still haven’t printed or hung those “must capture” moments from a year ago. 

While I sometimes laugh about how every new Seattle parent these days feels the need to run out and get one of those gigantic and expensive digital cameras, and seems to spend more time looking at their children through the camera lens rather than experiencing life by their side, I can’t deny my own desire to (over) record this time in our lives.  One of my goals for the New Year is to finally follow through on my intention for the taking photos in the first place and somehow display these moments in our home for all to cherish. 

Side note:  Photo books make fantastic presents for grandparents.  My sister did this as a Christmas gift one year for all of the grandparents and each of them said it was one of the best gifts they had ever received.