It's Spring!

I've finally committed to a Spring theme on the blog. Keith took a new picture for me over a week ago, but I was afraid that if I switched too early, it would jinx everything and snow would start falling the very next day.

Does this mean it won't snow tomorrow? Of course not! The first year we moved up to Cleveland, we had to dig out to drive to my parents' house for Easter. But I think I've waited long enough that you can't blame the snow on my blog header.

Photo Extravaganza!

I've been trying for a month now to sort through all of our photos and print them. It takes forever!

My goal is always to print photos about 4 times a year. We use Snapfish, and there's usually some kind of deal going on. Penny prints (only one cent per print, up to 300) just ended, and now there's free shipping on orders over $30. We're happy with Snapfish's prices and service, so the final ordering part is easy.

What's hard is deciding which photos to print. I often think that I couldn't imagine having kids before digital cameras, where you actually had to pay for film and getting pictures developed. It's astonishing how many pictures we take and never even use. For every one picture that we print, there's probably another 4 or 5 that we took at the same time, so we could make sure to get a good, usable shot.

In contrast, I often find myself drawn to the not very good pictures. We splurged for a nice camera with a few good lenses, which means that we have some gorgeous pictures of our kids that we'll treasure forever. But I also kind of like the blurry and off-center shots. Like the one above: I really like that one because I feel like it better conveys what our lives are like right now. The living room looks like an exploded toy bin, everyone is moving in different directions, and Gomez serenely watches over all. We also have some really grainy, awful low-light shots that Eleanor took on my iPod. They are of Keith and Declan, in Declan's room, in the early days after his birth. I like those shots because have that sense of late-night desperation and sleep deprevation that are the true hallmarks of having a newborn. All those beautiful close-ups of a peacefully sleeping baby? They are beautiful, but far removed from real life.

Of course, I'm not going to enlarge and frame those blurry bad photos. I don't show them to anyone. (Except, of course, on my blog!) But I like to print them and quietly put them away in albums, tucked in-between the beautiful shots, to remind myself not of how living with a baby looks, but how it feels.