I just rebuilt my website back in March of this year, and so there is the business of going back and rebuilding all the posts I lost from my previous site (death at the hand of Euro-hacking), which apparently, I’m not that jazzed at doing, seeing how sparse prior entries are.

But in the process of doing this, I have to go back through my old photos and it reminds me which things I previously thought were blog worthy, and thus are worthy of revisiting.

I came across these pictures of my youngest son and was struck by so many things.

1)  Don’t wait for special occasions to photograph your kids.

Anytime in the first 5 years is a special occasion.  They change every 2 seconds, and although they change significantly less quickly  after age 4 1/2, every photo is a time capsule.

For instance, here in these photos is a nice, round scar on Cole’s forehead.  I was SOOO upset when it happened. I saw the whole thing and was helpless to do a thing about it.  It was my older son’s first week of preschool, and as we ran back from the bathroom, Cole upended himself and fell so hard that he actually rolled forward AFTER hitting the ground face down.  He didn’t cry for super long, but that scar remained for months.  In these photos, it’s already 3 months old. but still visible.

2) Casual can be great.  These photos allowed him just to play and be himself, and I worked around that to get smiles.  Much more genuine that having him seated.  It really depends on age and temperament, but super young toddlers aren’t having it.  You’ve got to meet them where they live.

3) Go back and weed your photos later. You never know if you’ll remember to take any other photos in this time span of one tooth, or natural mohawk, whatever, so you keep everything initially.  But, it’s so much easier to be objective a year later.  Do I really need a bunch of out of focus photos?  Do I need 17 of the exact same, perfect photo? Having a lot of photos is great, but keeping bad ones sort of has the effect of devaluing the whole bunch.  Sort of like a Prince four-disc CD set without anyone else editing his work. I’m sure Crystal Ball has at least 8 KILLER songs on it, but I never seem to find the time to weed through 30 other songs.