Long before Aden and Hunter were born, I toyed with the idea of doing a photo journal of their first year. I decided to call it "365" and to take a picture a day, every day. I just saw it being all full of these cool shots and artsy images...
I told Mark about my idea. He seemed as enthused by it as I was, partly, I think, because he would get a new camera out of the deal. A picture a day it was gonna be!
We got a newer digital camera (one with a shorter delay between pressing the shutter and actually taking the fucking picture) to help us get better shots and embarked on our little project. We've been taking pictures as we remembered — sometimes at a few minutes before midnight realizing it'd almost slipped our minds for that day — and filing them away by date for the creation of some future album.
After looking at our first photos, I kissed the "artsy cool" photojournal idea bye-bye. I'd forgotten, of course, that babies don't do much at the beginning. They sleep, eat, shit. Stuff happens to them for the most part and there's nothing really earth shattering or cool about that. So, aside from the NICU photos, we had lots of mundane pictures of the babies laying around.
I know that eventually the action shots will come. We'll get a picture of a blurry toddler running off. Or one of a Maia hug. Or meeting the cats. Or a first trip to the park. Pictures of adventures and discoveries.
But still, I love looking at the albums that we're developing. 28 days have passed so far, four weeks, a month. I still can't believe it.
One day in the future I'll be able to look back at the distant memory of the NICU. I'll be able to chronicle Aden's face as it fills in; his body as it loses it's wiriness. I'll be able to see Hunter's coy look as it was and compare it to the one that develops. I'll be able to look and remember and have flashbacks to what Mark and I and the babies were doing on that particular day. I'll see them go from preemies to average babies to toddlers to kids to teenagers to adults. I'll marvel the entire time that these are our children.
And, crummy shots or no, all the work we do now will be so worth it to us in a year, five years, ten, twenty.
