Everyday photos

Going through the memory card on my camera is always an adventure. Ever since my daughter learned how to use the camera, she's become obsessed with taking pictures. And she learned how to use the camera before she turned 2. Yay point and shoot.

At first, what I ended up with after one of her photo sprees was 200 blurry photos of kneecaps and far-away faces. I still need to clear a lot of those out. I can probably free up a gig or so on my hard drive that way.

Now she's taking better pictures, but her subject matter is still...interesting. I just discovered that while I was making those mini pumpkin pies, she took 12 nearly identical photos of my mug tree.

There are also 20 or so photos of my rear end, taken while I was searching for the leaf cookie cutters. Which I will not be sharing, thank you. (Though I must say, it doesn't look as large from her angle as I thought it would.)

But then there's this adorable selfie.

And this slice of everyday: Her brother letting me know he wants out of the high chair.

Pictures like these are why I let her use the camera. It gives me a taste of life from her level.

I delete the blurry pics, and the duplicate pics, but leave the rest. The mundane images: The kitchen cabinets. The couch. The floor. These images are of her childhood home, and someday she may want to remember it just as it was.

Some of my favorite pictures are those that show what my world looked like when I was small. My mother's yellow kitchen curtains. My parents' cars, parked on the gravel driveway I dug through looking for rocks with fossils in them. The tree outside my bedroom window. I don't have photos of some of the things I wish I did: Mom's daffodils, for instance. And the sandbox my grandfather built for me. Those exist only in my mind now. But there are other photos. Little scraps of the girl I was, that someday I will share with my own kids.

Everyday things matter. Which is why I let my kid take photos of them.