I was always kind of bummed out about the absence of photos of me, though. It would have been fun to look back and see what I looked like at different ages, and even more fun to see personality traits emerging in certain photos--like, if I was hamming it up for the camera, or acting shy, or wearing mom's high heels and pearls as if I were ready to be all grown up. But mostly, I felt slighted that no one had apparently been interested enough in me to take pictures. As Jodi Piccoult said in her book My Sister's Keeper, "A photo says, 'You were so important to me that I stopped everything else to come watch'."

So. I have two kids, and I am diligent about taking photos of them. Ridiculously diligent. Our Flickr.com photo tally shows that we have close to 10,000 photos uploaded, although, to be fair, a few hundred of them are of my high school friends passed out next to a pile of puke--and a few thousand of them are of me making faces into the camera as I snap my own picture. Still, though, there are also a lot of photos of my kids. I want them to be able look back someday and know that they were so important to me that I stopped everything to come watch. Case in point:

Just yesterday I was sitting at the computer in the breakfast room while both kids were napping. Or so I thought, til I heard 3-year-old Jake muttering contemplatively to himself in the kitchen. His usual routine when awakening from a nap is to come find me, so I kept on reading my emails, knowing that eventually he'd make his way into to greet me. But when I could still hear him muttering to himself a few minutes later, I got curious, and went in to check on him. As I got up, I heard the click of his little potty chair lid closing, so I got immediately hopeful that he had been responsible enough to get out of bed and head straight for the potty instead of wandering around in his Pull-Ups (which he wears for naps) until I asked him to go use the potty. We keep a little potty on the tile in the area between kitchen and living room so that if he needs to get to it in a hurry, it's close by. As I rounded the corner, I found him naked from the waist down, a good sign. He had taken off his pants and Pull-Ups by himself! Then I looked closer, and was--well, a little dismayed to see what he was clutching in his little hands. I immediately I thought, "This kid is important to me, so it is my motherly duty to take his picture." The camera was right there on the kitchen counter, so I quickly snapped this photo and then thought, "This kid is really, really important to me, so I must post that picture on my blog."

So go ahead: Shower me in praise liberally sprinkled with such words as "mother of the year," "loving," "doting," and "selfless." These are the kind of things I expect to hear from Jake when he looks back at this photo as adult, so I might as well get used to hearing them now. Go ahead, I'm ready.