The Power of Print

Everyday when I wake up, I get to see a sweet little collage of our family photos hanging above our bed. Currently it is small and modest but it is there and I get to look at it every day. My boyfriend and my daughter get to look at it every day. When we wake up and before we go to bed, we see it. Then we walk down the stairs to see a canvas of our kids with huge grins on their faces.
 

Our home is filled with photos of us as a family and each kiddo has a growing stack of albums of all the moments and photo sessions we are blessed to have. Each one telling its own story of our life through the lens. Posed images and moments we didn’t know were being photographed.

My daughter loves to look at the albums and tell me all the things she is doing in each and every photo and all of the people that are in them with her. Last year, we lost this gorgeous and kind woman in the photo below. She was everything to us and now all we have are photos and memories of her. But my children still have several albums filled with photos showing them how much their great, great grandmother (not a typo) loved them and how she would read to them until her eyes crossed.

We fill our home with all of these memories for us to remember all the details of who they are and what we do as a family. We cover our walls in these memories to show our children how important they are to us and how their differences make them beautiful. We fill our shelves with albums to be able to pass down to each child so they can pass them to their children. The important moments to us will be learned about and remembered in generations we may not get to meet.

I know we live in an age where everything is online and so many of us get lost for hours on some device sharing and pinning and snapchatting with everyone we know. But nothing can beat that feeling I get when I wake up to the collage above my bed, or the look on my daughter's face as she flips through albums filled with her as she grows. Yes, these photos fill my newsfeed but more importantly, they fill our home.