Say Cheese!

Christmas 2005. That's the year we got our first digital camera. Kodak had announced they were getting out of the traditional camera film making business, making our fancy APS film camera obsolete. We were on the verge of having our first baby and we knew we'd be taking pictures and lots of them, so we rushed out to WalMart during some big Christmas sale and bought a Kodak Easyshare. Since then, we've gone through two cameras and have taken over 5000 thousand digital pictures...so many we even have an external hard drive to store all of them. The great thing about a digi cam is the instant gratification of seeing how your picture turned out (or maybe didn't turn out). They're fairly easy to use and so small they're easily portable. Still, even if one of us totes the camera around all day, we seem doomed to miss at least 50% of the really funny or cute kiddie photo ops because we put the camera down for two seconds...or there's that pesky nanosecond delay between pressing the button and the camera actually taking the picture. I've lost count of the number of times the kids were doing something priceless and one of us has sprinted across the house to grab the camera, only to come back and find the opportunity is forever gone. And sometimes...we hit the jackpot.

Here are a few really fun pictures we were lucky enough to capture recently:



This is by far my favorite. I left the room for maybe two minutes and found Lil Buddy had climbed into his dad's chair and grabbed a section of the newspaper. I guess he heard these are hard times and wants to find a way to support the family.



We caught this one about two minutes before SweetPea decided having her brother dog pile on her was no longer funny.



Daddy snapped this one in the seconds between the two of them pushing each other for dibs on sitting in the laundry basket alone.


No, SweetPea hasn't joined the crew on the International Space Station. On the ride home from the zoo a couple of weeks back, we heard her talking to herself and turned find she had covered herself completely with my dashboard sun guard. The picture was taken totally blind...The Man just stuck the camera underneath the sun guard and snapped. More than one turned out well, but this one was the best...and she thought it was hilarious.



There wasn't anything special about taking this one...but I shared it to show you that, with a huge choice of exotic animals to ride on the carousel that my daughter begged to ride...the salmon. Yeah, I have no clue why!

For some reason, I have friends and family who laugh at how many pictures that we take. Some of these people have small kids of their own. Honestly, I thought we took a pretty normal number of photos, but maybe not. How about you...do you always have your camera ready? Is yours collecting dust? Is your computer about to burst with the number of pictures YOU have??