Two Photos...Eleven Years Apart

Years ago--eleven to be exact--my youngest used to love to climb up on our bed when I was working on my laptop. He loved it when I would open up the camera and take pictures of him and me just sitting there. He loved looking at the computer screen, watching himself as if in a mirror, but it wasn't a mirror. I took a lot of pictures of the both of us having fun in front of the laptop camera.

The first picture I ever posted to social media is one of my son and me.

Tonight, as we watched Shark Tank, I asked him if he wanted to take a picture. I showed him the one I posted on January 19th, 2009. He was four at the time.

"I will, if I don't have to hold my hand up to my head," he said.

"No, nothing like that. I just want to see how we look now."

I took the picture. Now, you get to see what eleven years (to the day...) looks like.

As it happens with many families, the youngest child gets the fewest pictures taken of them. It's sad, but true. And what's interesting, at least with our family, when our youngest was born, we used film for the pictures--no digital photography for us twenty-five years ago. Now, everything is digital. I can take a thousand pictures and they're basically free. I can't even imagine what it would cost to develop a thousand pictures back then.

So, instead of a "ten-year photo challenge," here's an eleven-year one. For me, it's just over a decade. For my son, it's a lifetime.

A Few Photographs...Ten Year's Old

I guess the latest social media rage is finding a picture a decade old and posted next to a picture of yourself in the present day. And I fell for the immense pressure of the latest fad and posted a couple of pictures.

Thanks to the miracle that is Facebook, it time stamps every photo you've that's ever been posted on their site. While I was looking back at the pictures I noticed they were posted exactly ten years ago today, January 19th, 2009. In fact, the picture of my son and I was the first picture I ever posted to Facebook.

Back then, my son--who was four at the time--liked to sit with me and fool around with the Photo Booth feature on my MacBook Pro. We did that for years. And because everything can be saved and memory is so cheap, I've kept all those pictures my son and I took over the years.

Speaking of pictures, another picture that was date-stamped 1/19/09 on Facebook was a photo of my family the day we all took the Frontrunner for the first time. I believe it was the last family photo we've had taken, and it was not shot by a professional photographer, but a stranger to whom we handed a camera and asked them to take a picture of us all together.

I've taken tens of thousands of photographs since 2009. I wonder if I'll ever go back and look at them all. Maybe one day, but probably not.