What I Want To Remember

Sometimes, I question what I want to remember – I wonder if I’m doing it all wrong. Are 500 or so pictures of my baby’s first Christmas too many? What about the literally thousands of pictures of our day-to-day? How many pictures can you actually take of one baby sleeping or eating or playing? 

Have you ever actually taken the time to think about the things that you’re snapping away at? I’m thankful for the digital age that we live in where I can be so liberal with what I’m capturing. At the same time, though, is it making it entirely too easy to go overboard? 

My son was born on May 30 of last year. In his first month, I took a whopping 896 pictures – the overwhelming majority of which were, no doubt, of him. There were a few random pictures of the dogs or whatever current remodeling project we were working on, but for all intents and purposes, there are almost 900 pictures on my hard drive spanning just the first few weeks of his life. 

So, what exactly do I want to remember? Do I need to be taking 400 pictures each month? Yes, that’s how many there are – several thousand over the course of just nine short months. That’s an average, of course, but I think it drives my point home. I’ve done my due diligence and looked back through each of the folders that I neatly labeled with dates – I organized every last one of them.  

I remember looking through photo albums from when I was younger and seeing the same pictures over and over again – birthday parties and Christmas mornings. I remember seeing pictures from the zoo and the amusement park. Ironically, I remember seeing precious few pictures from our everyday lives. 

Back then, pictures weren’t as easy to take and save as what they are today and I’m sure that played into it. When I was younger, we had 35mm cameras and had to pay to get the film developed. Now, I can keep clicking away to my heart’s delight and I don’t actually have to print any of them. I can upload, edit, save, and back up – the only thing potentially standing in my way is the size of my hard drive.

It’s different now than it was then, but that still leaves the question of what exactly I should be taking pictures of. Currently, my answer seems to be anything and everything. Who knows, in ten years, what I’ll want to remember. 

I know that I want him to have more pictures of his day-to-day life than what I have of mine. I know that I want to remember the mundane and the everyday. I want to remember the boring and the ordinary. I want to remember as much of our lives as possible because nothing lasts forever and, at least with the help of a camera, I can capture those moments in time and the stories that they tell before they’re gone.  

What do you want to remember? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on capturing those moments – do you take more pictures of the special occasions or of your day-to-day? 

Written by: Cristi Wuenschel