Pictures for Throw Back Thursday: What I Learned During One Nostalgic Night

So there we were my husband and I, crippled by the sudden heat wave yesterday, determined not to turn on the air conditioning for one measly night (even though we looked at each other longingly when we heard our neighbor’s unit sputter to life.) We sucked it up and sat in our room with the window open and the fan on. Rather than participate in our normal nightly routine of inhabiting the rest of the house we stayed put. It somehow felt right to just hide away in our room with the sympathetic sheets and mattress welcoming us with open arms, knowing we were sleepy drunk off of the heat that had taken over. It was in this moment that my husband decided to clean out the pictures on his phone. It wasn’t a meticulously planned decision really. He had no choice in the mater.  It was more like once his phone reached 600 pictures I guess it wanted to go on strike. He started the tedious task of deciding what to keep and what should get the boot and after a few minutes I found myself chiming in with an opinion on every picture. Then, without even realizing it, we ended up becoming so engrossed in the pictures, I didn’t want it to end. As we poured through the endless cascade of memories, two things became abundantly clear: My husband likes to take pictures of random intimate objects and I realized how unbaby like my baby is nowadays.

Maybe I should rephrase that last one to I forgot how small and immobile my child used to be. All I remember from those magical (ok sleep deprived) first weeks and months was that I had been told I had an alert child and somehow in my mind I guess that manifested itself into a “fact” that my child has been independently moving around since birth which, as I’m sure you all know, was not the case. As we flipped further and further into the past I saw my child regress into a dependent floppy blob that occasionally would get a body tick and flail an arm out. It was the most baffling and mysterious thing to me, like I was looking at a creature I had never seen before. I was really amazed that in just a few short months, the memory of my tiny newborn had vanished into oblivion. Then it really did hit me, an article my mommy friend Erika shared from the Huffington Post, about how we are so focused on the present stages our children are going through that all past and future milestones are not even on our radar and it is so true. Right now I am worried about running after a wobbly walker and making sure I am feeding my kid enough nutritional foods so that we can wean her off formula. These are consuming all of my concentration right now. Trying to swaddle and worry about tummy time are sooo late 2012. 

It was also refreshing to see pictures taken from my husband's perspective. He is an amazing father and obviously with over 600 pictures, very attentive.

Without further adieu, here I present to you just a few of Emma's pictures then and now. I can't believe how much she has grown in such a short time.