Year five of forever
Full disclosure, this photograph was taken about a full month before Father’s Day. This post is being written in advance, by nearly a full month before Father’s Day. Seeing as how would be abroad on actual Father’s Day, I decided to knock this out a little early, so that it would not be looming over my head as a critical must-do, as my departure date drew nearer, so it was in my best interests to take it early, so I wouldn’t have to rush the photo taking, editing, printing, and writing out the corresponding post.
Plus it’s one of the few things I look forward to more than anything in the world, so why not treat myself for a change, especially with the cesspool of S+ difficulty I deal with in my everyday life generally.
Honestly, I still sometimes look at my kids and I can’t believe that I’m a dad. My girls are six and four, so I’ve been a dad for a little while now, but sometimes it still feels surreal that I have contributed towards the creation of lives, and my offspring are already both going to be in elementary school together, start of the next school year.
Even when they were tiny little nuggets of babies, it was hard to fathom what the future would look like, and how these kids would eventually be walking and talking, going to school and having their brains metaphorically exploding with all the knowledge and experience they’d be coming into over the passage of time.
Now, we have conversations regularly, they’re always asking questions, and they can walk, talk, run, jump, and they love to play games and do puzzles and draw pictures and build with Legos. As the current school year came to a close, both brought home little booklets that showed a glimpse of time lapse of their handwriting and their drawing acumen throughout the course of the school year, and it’s amazing to see just how much both of them had progressed.
They’ll always be my babies, but make no mistake, they’re two grown kids that have intelligence, personalities, capabilities and talents already. And I still can’t believe that I had a hand in making them.
One thing I’ve noticed more recently is the fact that my girls have slowly been phasing out “dada” and been more frequently referring to me as just “dad.” It hasn’t been a full-on swap just yet, and dada still comes out from them both, although more from #2 than #1, but it has not gone unnoticed by me that I’ve been hearing a lot more dad instead of dada.
The thing is, I never coached or deterred them from use of one name or the other, it has been happening completely organically to my knowledge. But seeing as how both kids, their first words were dada, it unsurprisingly makes me feel a little melancholy to know that they’re gradually phasing it out of their go-to vernacular.
Seeing as how we’ve made it to year five of blet picture day, now seems as good of checkpoint as any to bust out the all-important time lapse. I’ve long been a fan of great long term photo lapses, and this was always one of the sub-quests of doing an annual photo, to see just how rampant the growth of my children can be, and as anyone with eyes can see, my kids are no exception to the rule of just how much they grew between the first year and fifth years of blet picture day.
As mentioned above, I do print these photos out, and I keep them in an album specifically meant to hold 8×10’s. Only one photo gets added a year, but it’s already among my most precious treasures, and is definitely on the homeowner’s list of things I’d risk going into a burning house to retrieve, which is kind of silly, considering I have all the originals and I could reproduce this however many times I’d want, but few things ever beat the OG.
The album itself has enough pages to where my kids will be 31 and 29 by the time I reach the next cover. By then, I will be well into my 60s, but it will be the absolute ultimate lifetime achievement if we’re all able to make it to the back of the album.
The funny thing is, I’m sure all of my zero readers have noticed that I’m carrying a different blet in each image; obviously this is done intentionally, but the thing is, as many blets as I do have, I don’t have enough to make it all the way to the other end, although I will be close. So it there were ever a reason to keep my eyes peeled for moar blets throughout the next two decades, this is it.
Until then, lots of random small questions exist, like when will my girls be able to shoot together, instead of me needing to take separate images, and composite them? When will the girls demand to be standing and posing, instead of plopped down into a chair and staying still? What different blets will come into my possession over the passage of time?
Who knows the answers to any of these, but it will be likely entertaining and enjoyable for me to find out.
