Picture Guilt.

Most parents have all witnessed the school play, the piano recital, the birthday party, or the soccer game, where a row of moms and dads hold out their cell phones and snap away at little Aidan or graceful Emily. Many of you know the family member who spends the holiday gathering or family vacation behind a camera. I've done it myself, despite my mantra to "put the phone down". As much as I love taking pictures, that's not why I take them at holidays and school events. In fact, I'd much rather not take them. The last time Quin had an end of year performance at his pre-school graduation, I realized I had missed listening to the first song because I was frantically trying to get a CF card in my camera. I felt guilty. Luckily it started raining and they ran inside and performed it all again. But I still felt guilty. So why do we parents take pictures in the first place? If you're like me, it's often because of 'picture guilt'. That thought that if you don't capture your kid at that particular moment, you'll never remember it. That you'll child will somehow be worse off if they don't have a picture of every major moment in their life unless you document it. That all of your Facebook friends religiously post pictures of their kids' every move so you should too or you're the worst parent in the world. I feel it all of time, and I hate it. I want to be there, watching with my eyes, not my lens. I'd rather have the memory than an album full of pictures. But then the 'what-ifs' creep in, and I wonder if I'll regret not having pictures a few years from now. So I take them. In the past year or two, I've been trying to find a way to resolve it, to find a balance. So instead of feeling like I have to capture every moment of Quin's life, I've asked myself what I really want to remember.  And usually it's the little things. I want to remember that he loved legos and airplanes, how playing in the sink could entertain him for an hour, how he ate breakfast by himself before the rest of us got up, and the snuggles with Daddy. So now, in the quiet moments when I find him doing those every day things, I get my camera. Just for a minute or two. And I don't feel like I'm missing anything. He does those things all of the time. The guilt disappears, and I'm left with pictures that really matter.