Strike A Pose

(Toddlers and Tiaras - TLC)

I have a theory...scientifically unproven...entirely untested...but a theory nonetheless. We are raising a generation of camera hounds. Yeah, I said it. I dare anyone with a digicam and kids to tell me you don't have a bagillion pics of your kids...I don't know...picking their noses... saved to your hard drive or maybe sitting on a memory card (P.S. if you do, please run to your computer and download them NOW before some cosmic mishap happens and they are lost forever...just sayin). Convince me there aren't hours...no days worth of kid footage on You Tube. Jon and Kate Plus 8 anyone? Face it...we follow...no we stalk our kids like Hollywood paparazzi..."hey...look over here"..."smile for the camera"..."just one more...please?"

...Then the other day a thought hit me, "OMG...is all this picture taking making my kids...vain????" It used to be that my SweetPea wanted little or nothing to do with picture taking. We were lucky that she wasn't overly squirmy, so getting her to sit still for photo ops wasn't the problem. Getting her to smile was. To look at our three year, encyclopedic stash of photo files, you'd think we had either the most serious or the most miserable kid on the planet. Only really candid pics...the "lucky shots" ever showed her smiling. Then something happened. Next thing I know, when I go grabbing for the camera, SweetPea starts asking me "Mommy...do you want to take my picture?" Well, OK...sure (though, believe it or not...I wasn't necessarily getting it to taking her picture). Then I get a pose...a POSE. All of a sudden images of Toddlers and Tiaras...of three year old girls with makeup caked on...with two tons of Aqua Net holding up huge beauty queen hair...striking poses that are just plain wrong for anyone too young to drive...nay...to young to even know how to tie her own shoes. Worse yet, the face of a certain young lady in our extended family (who shall remain nameless to protect the annoying) pops in my head...she, who relishes in walking people through the house to point out all of the pictures of her...and who finds a way to make an appearance in any photo op that happens within 50 feet of her. Please, oh please, don't let that be my little girl.

Of course at some point, I snap out of my state of panic...that was until the other day, when we went out to Chuck E Cheese. Next thing I know, there's my little supermodel feeding tokens into the photo sketch machine...positioning her self just so for her photo shoot. Here we go. I walk over and start thumbing through the stack of sketches...



OK, so this one is kinda cute, in a "hey...how far can you see up my nose?" sort of way. And then I find this gem:


I laugh...out loud...a laugh that carries across the nearly empty restaurant. SweetPea looks up at me with a huge, proud smile "That's funny, Mommy!" It seems that she was having fun making faces at the machine and seeing what the pictures would look like. I finally realized that she's more fascinated with the whole photographic process than she is obsessed with how good she looks. She seems to realize that she can capture a split second moment in time and that she can change her expressions to make those pictures look different. I also learned that she's not at all opposed to letting someone share in the fun:



And then there's Lil Buddy, whose contribution to the world of photography usually ends up looking like....this:




Do you have any little "posers"...any junior camera hounds?