photos WITH them.

I'm not sure if  any of you have come across this article in your time on the internet, but it was one of my favorite and certainly one I reflect on often while raising my babies:

"Too much of a mama's life goes undocumented and unseen. People, including my children, don't see the way I make sure my kids' favorite stuffed animals are on their beds at night. They don't know how I walk the grocery store aisles looking for treats that will thrill them for a special day. They don't know that I saved their side-snap, paper-thin baby shirts from the hospital where they were born or their little hospital bracelets in keepsake boxes high on the top shelves of their closets. They don't see me tossing and turning in bed wondering if I am doing an okay job as a mother, if they are okay in their schools, where we should take them for a vacation, what we should do for their birthdays. I'm up long past the news on Christmas Eve wrapping presents and eating cookies and milk, and I spend hours hunting the Internet and the local Targets for specially-requested Halloween costumes and birthday presents. They don't see any of that.

Someday, I want them to see me, documented, sitting right there beside them: me, the woman who gave birth to them, whom they can thank for their ample thighs and their pretty hair; me, the woman who nursed them all for the first years of their lives, enduring porn star-sized boobs and leaking through her shirts for months on end; me, who ran around gathering snacks to be the week's parent reader or planning the class Valentine's Day party; me, who cried when I dropped them off at preschool, breathed in the smell of their post-bath hair when I read them bedtime stories, and defied speeding laws when I had to rush them to the pediatric ER in the middle of the night for fill-in-the-blank (ear infections, croup, rotavirus).

I'm everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me with them. Someday I won't be here -- and I don't know if that someday is tomorrow or thirty or forty or fifty years from now -- but I want them to have pictures of me. I want them to see the way I looked at them, see how much I loved them. I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect to love, but I am perfectly their mother."

I love this theory, this idea. My mom did a fantastic job of documenting every moment of our childhood and to this day, it's one of our very favorite things to look back on. But what I love more than seeing photos of us as young children, is seeing my parents, the way they dressed, how they were together and just them being them - the simplicity of it. No fancy outfits or special occasions, just day to day life, being a family. 

So....get in the picture, MAMA.  You don't have to instagram it or put it on facebook, but tuck it away with those hospital bracelets or take it back a few years and put it in a real tangible photo album...because it will undoubtedly be more valuable than you could imagine years down the road. After all, memories are gold.