A picture is worth a thousand words

I have always loved taking pictures.  Just as a good song can immediately take you back and bring about a wide range of emotions, so too can a great, or not so great, picture.  I probably developed an interest from my dad who almost always had his camera with him when we were growing up.   Much to my dismay, my parents' upstairs hallway is proof positive that I lived up to the late 80's/early 90's big hair craze in a major way.  In fact, in many of the pictures of me and my sisters from that time, you can literally only see hair in the picture...lots and lots of Aqua Net-sprayed hair!  As much as I am horrified by many of those old photos, oftentimes when we are at their house, I find myself walking slowly through the hallway glancing through those snapshots that bring back so many memories.  Too bad we didn't have digital photography back then because I am notorious for almost always deleting photos of myself.  Since I'm usually the one taking the pictures though, I tend to luck out and be mysteriously absent from most of my own photo sessions.  Who likes a picture of themselves anyways, right?  I've always said that in a burning house one of the first things I would have to save (aside from my children, of course!) would be my many photos and photo albums.  As I posted in a previous blog entry, I was recently looking back at photos from the first few months after we had Luke and Olivia.  As sad as it makes me to realize that time was such a sleepy-eyed, emotional blur, thank goodness for those photos that will last a lifetime...those photos that will serve as proof that we did take the time to live in the moment, to cherish all of those newborn "firsts" that so quickly pass us by.

I've always wanted to take a professional photography class.  I so wish I was better a capturing certain moments, but even the most basic shot is often worth saving, especially when it comes to photos of the kids.  Here is just a random assortment of some of my favorites from the past month or so (apologies for the strange formatting that I can't quite figure out)...