Reminding Myself

I've mentioned before that this stretch leading up to the holidays has been a busy one for me. As I said in my pre-Thanksgiving post, I am definitely grateful for all of the work I've had, but I've also had to work hard at maintaining balance.

Tonight, for whatever reason, I thought it might be fun to pull out the home videos. I confess that I've been a spotty videographer, with some events getting coverage on the scale of the Olympics and others getting what's typically granted to, say, a minor uptick in jaywalking. Suffice it to say that still photography has been my focus. But I've managed to record a reasonable amount of the last nine years on video, and I've managed to burn (or have burned) a decent amount of that footage to DVD.

As the kids and I sat and watched the first couple of videos, I could only ask myself, "Why have we not done this before?" So the videos are sometimes sloppily edited and my husband's voiceovers can sometimes border on cringe-worthy (I said "border on," honey).

And yes, it was very hard to explain to my three-year-old why there is not a single video with her in it. In my defense, I've taken some, but nothing has yet been edited or burned. I tried explaining this to her, telling her that I knew for sure that we had a movie of her birth because I remember giving copies to our relatives one Christmas. I may have to ask one of them to lend it to us for dubbing, because it seems we're without our own copy. My explanation, however, only led to her sweet and pitiful requests, at each disk change, for me to put on the one of "the day she was borned."

So I have some work to do on behalf of my third child. Duly noted. But tonight I also got a big reminder of what has been important in my life since I got married, and I got an incredible reality check regarding how quickly my children are changing.

We'll keep the videos within easy reach from now on, though based on my kids' track record with rentals, only household members over 35 will be allowed to touch them. And because no post is good without a photo, here are a few quick snaps of E while the rest of us were watching a video of him at two years old assembling a big puzzle on his own. I love that he's as focused on a Lego project here as he was on the puzzle back then.





Now I must go and clean up the entire glass of milk that the middle child just spilled. And I'm reminded why it is occasionally tempting to bury oneself in work.