Documenter of Life

These days, you will rarely find me leaving the house for any sort of adventure (big or small) without my camera in tow. There is seldom a family event that I do not capture with the enthusiasm and gusto of an award winning journalist. Vacations, field trips, family hikes, evening walks, dinners out…I could show you the pictures that tell the story of any and all of these events. Fortunately for my family, within the past year, I’ve been able to scale back a bit and decipher which family outings really necessitate lugging along my big girl camera and which do not…but I always have my iphone there just in case!

For as well documented as our lives are now, I was not always quite the ‘documenter of life’ that I am today. In fact, it wasn’t until I was pregnant with my third child that I really fell in love with taking pictures. Something sparked inside of me when I realized that, with the help of my camera, I could somehow hold little tiny pieces of those moments that had been slipping through my fingers like sand. I began to understand, as my then two daughters were growing and changing every day, that by documenting our lives with my camera, I could have all the souvenirs I wanted from this beautifully crazy journey of motherhood.

We have an incredible amount of pictures from my third daughter’s first year onward. I wish I had documented her sisters’ lives and all the preceding moments with as much fervor…but I didn’t and that’s okay. Every moment matters. I didn’t spend any time obsessing over whether I needed to go back and try to verbally capture those same moments from the best my memory could afford me. I simply started where I was. I simply began to document, to the best of my abilities, the moments that were in front of me at that time…my new baby, her two big sisters, their proud daddy, and our happy little family.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been capturing the stories all along or if you’re just falling in love with your camera and the memories it can capture. It’s never too late to start collecting those souvenirs of all your family adventures…from milestones and celebrations to smiles and dinners. Just begin. There will be a day when you will be so glad to have those stories to read over and over again!

See more from Everyday Storyteller –Maegan Beishline here.