Documenting Childhood
I am impressed with all the creative parents out there who have come up with unique ways of documenting their children’s growth. I’m not just talking about height, but also the other things that come with growing- dexterity, language, laughter, expression.
I’ve seen the monthly, weekly, daily photos of kids compiled into time lapse videos that show an 18-year physical transformation in five minutes. There are parents who take photos and videos of “firsts” and make them into photo books, or capture a funny moment that later becomes a meme. Some parents start an Instagram page under their infant’s name and post photos for family and friends (these are the same hipsters who, pre-baby, also had Instagram accounts for their dogs or cats or iguanas). Some really talented parents make mini-blockbusters with special effects out of the imaginative games their kids play.
It is rare to get a perfect photo of a toddler or infant the first time- kids squirm, cry, refuse to look at the camera, get distracted by the dog- so you usually end up with multiple shots of nearly the same thing. Most people shuffle through them to find the one they think will best represent them and their kid on social media (not the one with the six-pack of beer in the background or the one taken just after the dog licked the kid’s face and made him cry).
When they are teenagers, you get this look a lot (Maggie on the right).
One friend of ours took advantage of all those multiple shots and put them together to create gifs of different moments in his son’s life. He posts them to a website where grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends can all ooh and ahh over the kid and his parent’s creative genius. They are pretty awesome. I might have to subscribe to the RSS feed just so I don’t miss any new posts.
I never would have thought of doing these kinds of things while my kids were growing up. I sporadically wrote in their baby books, put short descriptors on the backs of printed photographs, and later started to write about them on a blog. Now that my kids are 20, 17 and 15, I sometimes employ more modern memory makers. That is to say, I take embarrassing photos of them (past and present) and turn them into memes I think are pretty funny. They almost never agree.
