I was working on choosing photos for my daughter's senior page in her yearbook. This meant getting out the photo albums from the early years! The albums are labeled by year, the photos placed in the sleeves when they were fresh from the developer.
Way back before digital cameras, you had to take the film to the drug store to get it developed. And remember to ask for duplicates for the grandparents. And there were always those odd random shots when you were trying to use up the film. Seems like there are cameras around here that held 110 film, 126 film, 35mm, and those funny little canisters that you got back and you have to store those forever.
I can tell exactly when I got my first digital camera because the albums, as they were, stop and the computer files begin!!
As I was looking through the albums, I was swept back in time.
To the first time she came home from the hospital in her University of Tennessee sweat suit and then the second time she came home after having to be re-admitted, this time in a beautiful pink smocked Felton Brothers dress, complete with slip, bonnet and tiny white leather shoes. Her first bath, with Grandmother pouring water gently over her hair. Grandmother, who jumped on a plane, and came to stay with us when my baby girl showed up several weeks early!
To her first day of preschool, when I took her picture standing next to the stairs and she is barely taller than the third step. I've taken her picture standing in the same spot on the first and last day of school every year. On the last day of PK, she couldn't go to school because she had chicken pox. Her teachers came to visit her after school was over that day and brought her papers and things from school. In her picture that day, she is dressed in a yellow outfit, a faint dusting of cornstarch powder covering her face.
To ballet recitals, first bike rides, visits to the pumpkin patch, the apple orchard, the fire station, carnivals, a series of cow girl halloween costumes, classroom parties, snow days, Easter egg hunts, holidays in Tennessee, birthday parties and loving aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.
She sat on the floor with me and helped me select the photos, knowing that I would give her final say in what appeared in the yearbook. Both of us laughing and remembering some fun times.
I am glad I was able to be her room mother at school and capture so many images. I am glad that she has been in school with so many of the same children since lower school. I am glad I have gotten to watch them grow.
As I started to scan the photos and she went back to filling out a college application, I realized that those little photos give me great memories to enjoy, for now, for later and when she is away from home.
I love you, my brown eyed girl!
