In her blog, Life As I Know It: Barbies, Crayons, and Diapers, Tasha describes a camping trip her family recently took, her son Ben’s very first. It’s clear that her family had a great time all around, but Tasha entitled her post, “A Story About Camping and 1 Bad Momma.” Why? Well, because she has no photos of the trip. “We started packing the car to go home,” Tasha writes, “and I realized I didn’t take one picture. I was overwhelmed with guilt and even wanted to cry.”
Boy, do I understand! I often think I’m in danger of making PHOTOS of an event more important than the event itself! In two comments, Tasha’s readers pointed out that she was actually having so much fun, and so involved in the moment, that she didn’t have time or the urge to interrupt herself with picture-taking, which is okay.
Now, pictures and the scrapbook layouts they inspire are very important to me, so I’m speaking as someone who definitely advocates having a camera handy and using it– but it IS okay to miss photo ops, and you can still come up with layouts to commemorate an event without pictures. If Tasha has, or can print out, a map of the campground, for example, she could include that in a layout with a current photo of her son, and in journaling she could describe some of the activities he enjoyed the most.
Far from being a bad mother, I suspect Tasha is a very good one, who devoted herself to making sure her children had fun while remaining safe, to the extent that picture-taking just wasn’t the priority. Does anyone else have any ideas about how Tasha can feature her son’s first camping trip without photos from the actual event?
