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Encouraging Heroes. You can be one too.

I think one of the trickiest, most understated parts of parenting is keeping up with the photo album. It’s hard to have a camera on you at all times for those cute moments that you’d like to cherish forever: your three year old spilling spaghetti sauce all over the clean, white carpet; your kids fighting and screaming over who gets to hold the new toy; etc. Things have changed a bit with the advent of the smartphone. Now pretty much everyone has a camera on them at all times, making it easier to catalogue random moments in your kids’ childhoods without lugging around a big camera. I would definitely still keep the names of some professional photographers though, unless you want the family photo on your mantlepiece to be a blurry, pixelated jpeg with bad lighting.

The traditional family album itself is changing now. Most people store their photos online, either on iPhoto, Facebook, or just in a desktop folder or external hard drive. I have to admit, it makes me a little sad to think that the thick, dusty photo album of yesteryear is going extinct. Merely the sight of that old tome used to conjure feelings of nostalgia and deep family heritage. Now it almost just seems unnecessary. After all, the photos themselves will perish eventually, unless you digitize them. And at that point, with virtually everything else going online or digital, yeah, why not just store the photos on your computer?

I’m not arguing one way or the other, except to say that it is still important to capture those timeless family photos. All too often, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re too busy and ‘oh, he’ll walk for the first time again,’ but the reality is many of these moments are once in a lifetime. You may look back someday and regret that you don’t have a photo of your kids trying to lasso the family dog, or getting dressed up for their first Halloween. For the most part, people are taking more pictures than ever these days. But are they pictures they’ll want to remember? Make sure you’re capturing the essence of your family. Someday, they’ll thank you and you’ll thank yourself.

Earnest Parenting: help for parents who want to preserve those special memories.

Image courtesy of /Valerie ReneA via Creative Commons license, some rights reserved.