The latest craze on Facebook has been to post a current photo of yourself beside a photo of you in high school. It seems everyone has been doing it and it’s been fun to see which of my friends has changed a lot and which ones haven’t. I always love to look at photographs, and also take them, so this has been a fun trend designed to break all the daily drama that plays out on the website. So I decided to play along and I’ve really struggled to find a photo of myself as a child. I always remember thinking that I really didn’t belong to the rest of the Burke’s, most of them are tall and thin. I often thought that maybe wild Indians dropped me off or maybe I was abandoned by a traveling carnival. When I would look at old pictures there were baby pictures of Jeanne and Vicki, but none of me. I guess as I got older I realized that by the time parents have a third daughter, they really don’t pull the camera out of the closet much.
So now we are in the Iphone age and every parent walks around practically with a camera attached to their hand. Today’s parents are taking selfies with their child at the ballgame or snapping photos of their kids at the park. This has caused me to think of a commercial that played a lot a couple of years ago. The commercial featured a boy doing a cannonball into a pool. In mid jump the video stops and the little boy, turns his head and looks at his mom and says, “I’ve been stuck in your phone for 3 months!” And so the ad reminds us to print our pictures. So it’s true that modern parents do take more photos of their kids; doing funny things, participating in sports, sleeping or making a mess eating spaghetti with their whole faces. But do you print your photos? When your children are grown ups, are they going to have photo albums to sit and reminisce with?
Here’s what I do and maybe this little trick will help you. There are several different online companies that will print your uploaded photos. You can choose many different sizes and even add messages or cute borders and the company time stamps the back of the photo with the date. Shutterfly is a great one that I often use. But there are many others websites. Shutterfly will also act as a virtual storage of photos because they don’t delete your photos. If I take an Iphone photo of the grandkids that I love, I upload it to Facebook, save it to my hard drive, then upload it to Shutterfly and print it. I have several photo albums for Ryan and Delainey that I’ve compiled over the years. Recently I’ve added some Iphone photos of them. Delainey loves to get my phone and text her Pop. They have funny conversations, sitting 3 feet away from each other. She loves to use emojis and so I sometimes print their conversations. At Christmas she always looks forward to her elf, Quazie, who comes before Christmas to watch over them and he is always doing such crazy stunts. Jennifer takes photos of Quazie almost each morning as he has made a mess or has managed to get himself into some terrible predicaments. So I’ve printed all of those Quazie pictures and I imagine one day she will remember and laugh at that silly elf. Also one day this past fall, Ryan wanted to use my big camera to take photos of Delainey playing soccer, so we had a quick photography lesson. I noticed him framing his shot and shooting, so I took a great Iphone picture of him.
So while I think it’s great that everyone is taking more photos, complete the step; print them. Our phones grow obsolete, our computers crash, memories will fade. Give your kids the best gift you can give them; take their photo often and print them. Make them photo albums and scrap books. They will love you for giving them a tangible memory they can hold on to.
No comments:
Post a Comment