Memories are such a magical thing. When you’re a parent, you want to make sure every memory of your child is etched on your brain forever. I was terrified I was going to forget things. Taking lots of photographs helps to make sure they stay alive forever.
Although we missed the first 9 months of our daughter’s life, we still got to see many firsts. Her first crawl, her first tooth, her first step. I wanted to make sure I had a record of everything.
Photographs really are priceless. Seeing them brings back how you felt in the moment the snap was taken. I recently did a guest blog for MrsMummyHarris as part of her “A Picture Tells a Thousand Words” series. I knew instantly which photograph I was going to use when I agreed to take part.
This photo was taken on the second day of introductions and it absolutely melts my heart. You can read my post here post here and the story behind it.
In the almost 3 years since little miss has been home, I’ve probably taken about 3000 photographs of her. Most of them are stored in my cloud, some I’ve got prints of.
Our daughter’s foster carer gave us a lot of photos of her from the months before we met. She was placed with them the day after she was born so we have photos of her as a tiny newborn too which I’m very grateful for. They are the kind of photos which will play such an important part in her life story work as she’s growing up.
Photographs will help her piece together her birth history. She can see what her birth mum and her siblings look like which will hopefully help her understand where she came from. Unfortunately, there aren’t many photos of her with her birth mum. She didn’t attend the goodbye contact session so the only record she has of that is with her eldest 2 siblings.
Modern technology makes it so easy now to capture your memories with camera phones. I’ve always got mine poised to take a shot. That sometimes means I miss the moment because I’m too busy trying to take the picture!
It’s so easy to share them too. Gran and Granma both have iPads so I can share photos with them so easily that way. For Granma in particular, this makes such a difference for her. She isn’t in the best of health and sometimes she doesn’t see little miss as much as she’d like to because of it. Sending a load of photographs across makes her day and she sits and looks at them for hours.
We’ve got some prints of our favourite photos but as we’ve got so many pictures, it’s hard to choose which ones to print. I’ve always been a fan of photobooks as they are a good way of having physical copies that don’t take up much room. They make great presents too. They can be a bit time consuming so I’m pleased that apps like Popsa and Printastic are now available which make creating a photobook from your tablet very easy.
As the seasons are starting to change and summer is drawing to an end, I’m going to make time to look back at all the photos of the precious memories we’ve created in the last few months. They’ll help to make the summer last that little bit longer too.
