Every single moment of my children’s lives is captured on camera for us to gush over and remember and marvel at.
There are the teeny tiny newborn pictures and the first crawl pictures and the sun holiday pictures and the off to creche pictures and the Christmas morning pictures and anything and everything in between.
And thanks to smartphones and apps and Instagram, we are all taking more pictures than ever before. Pictures are such sweet memories. They capture moments time and preserves them for us, to take out long after the moment has passed and just remember. Remember how little they were. How good they smelled. How perfect, how messy, how loud and how filled with love those days were.
The thing is, mamas, much as we are all fast becoming expert photographers when it comes to snapping our children, how many pictures are YOU in yourselves?
If you are anything like me, you often end up stuck as the photographer and rarely, sometimes never, end up in the picture.
But that needs to change. Because remember this, those pictures, all those memories, are not just for you to pull out and remember days with your children, they are also for them to pull out – to remember days with you.
And there is a lot of us in the same boat, it seems. Which is probably why this photographer’s recent Facebook post – reminding mums to get IN the picture – went as viral as it has.
Kaylin Maree Schimpf, an inspirational speaker from Glen Rose, Texas, posted an emotional plea to Facebook, noting this phenomenon. She calls on men to take more photos of their wives for the sake of the kids, because they’ll cherish having pictures of mom to see once she’s gone.
This is what Schimpf wrote in full, reminding dads to put mum in the picture:
Dear men…. take the photo…
It doesn’t matter what she looks like, or if she tells you no, take the photo. You may not think about it often, or at all honestly. But how many photos does she capture of you, of your family and of your life you’ve built. But when she is gone, those photos won’t show your children the women who was behind the camera.
Take the photo. Messy hair, no make up or a dirty old t-shirt won’t matter to your children when she is gone someday. What will matter is that you loved what you saw enough to take a photo, to document it, to preserve that moment in time of the woman you love. No woman wants to look back at a lifetime of selfies. Do what she does for you every day, and snap a few moments in time.
Be proud. Take photos of her. Before kids and after.
Just take the photo….
