I haven't printed a picture in years (unless I'm sending them to my grandmother). Instead each year I compile all of our photos for the year onto Shutterfly and design a photo book. It's a creative project to some extent but it doesn't look anything like those pimped-out scrapbooks that my kids' babysitter makes for them each year (she has a love for feathery labels on each page). In fact, after 4 years with his babysitter, Liam has about 3 books full of these pages, which is a neat perk. There are pages for each holiday, season and sometimes the more artistic pages like "Bottoms Up". Liam and Josh will just have to live with the fact that their babysitter may have been more creative and artistic with each of their scrapbooks than their mom was with my annual photo book!
The 2009 book is still awaiting purchase on my Shutterfly account and as I wait for the first few teacher paychecks to sink into the account, I begin to realize that the pictures I'm taking right now look an awful lot like the pictures I took a year ago and that those look a bit like the pics taken the year before that (minus Joshy) and so on. And so I said to Bill, "Gee, we just seem to take the same pictures each and every year." And so it is that if you look through the photo books from 2007, 2008, 2009 and (coming-not-so-soon because I won't even start it until January) 2010; the settings just remain the same. You could technically look on page 28 of each of the books and find that we are, say, picking Easter eggs. Or on page 72 picking out our yearly pumpkins. We do tend to set into certain habits, like picking apples every year at the same place (due to their inordinately tasty apple cider donuts). And the summer barbecue pictures do tend to blur together with the mangy looking kids in the sandbox, the grill filled with meat, corn & more meat, and the men tossing a baseball back and forth.
I think in about 15 years I'll remake all of our photo books but instead of making them organized by year, I'll go by event/activity. Because that's where the real change has been. It started out with fewer children in the pictures-but somehow we still looked frazzled. Then the children began to take over until now there are 6 cousins each running in different directions. The faces have changed as Liam has lost his pudgy cheeks and Joshua has (thankfully) grown some more hair. Sometimes I accidentally on purpose dress Josh in a hand-me-down from Liam and have him wear to the same event- just for kicks- only 3 years later. Once all the event-based books were made, they could be used as flip books like the Bazooka Joe or Captain Underpants books! It would be like watching the kids grow up all over again.
Looking through our old photo books (they're Josh's new favorite books) I also see how few pictures we've been taking of "the place" we're at. A picture is not apparently complete without a smiling kid. There are few pictures of Bill or I without kids. Even a picture of a shark needs to have someone's nose pressed up against the glass in front of it. Really, a shark doesn't get his own picture?
Videos are no different. We watched a video of Liam dancing the other day and asked ourselves- didn't we just make a similar video of Josh dancing last week?
I think next year when I take pictures, I'll take really bizarre pictures. I'm going to look for things we haven't done before. But then again, we all really do look forward to our annual trips to: the corn maze in the fall, camping with all of our friends in the summer and day trips to the local museums. So maybe we should skip the picture of Liam pointing in awe at the mastodon skeleton and instead take a picture of- just the mastodon skeleton? But then our book really would never change- he's certainly not going anywhere. Maybe it's time to teach Liam & Josh some funny faces... just to spice our 2011 photo book up a bit.
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