The Unsustainable Cuteness Bubble and Resulting Photography Glut

It should have been the happiest day of my parenting career.  I had just been tapped by Jason, the Don of DadCentric, to enter the inner circle of the most powerful group blog in the dad-o-sphere.  I was a made man.  The future was spread out before me in a pastiche of Scorcese-esque images: luxurious homes and automobiles, custom-made suits, diamond-encrusted chinchillas for my wife, and a small but swanky apartment for my brassy, psychotic mistress. And of course, only the best boarding schools for my 19 month-old twin girls.

But before plowing ahead with my new life, I had to get my proverbial house in order.  There were bills to pay, travel plans to be shuffled, long-time acquaintances to be snubbed, and tracks to be covered.  Fortunately, my wife takes care of all that shit.  All I needed to do was to back up the data on my iPhone.      

I had bought the phone back in August and blah blah blah boring blah exchanged phone blah blah didn't bother backing it up blah blah boring. So I plugged the phone into my ancient MacBook, and absentmindedly clicked on an option in the dropdown window that had the word "restore" in it, which, my wife later told me (repeatedly because I'm a slow learner), is a code word for "destroy everything you hold dear." 

It turns out that iTunes doesn't care about the photos, videos, and contact information on your iPhone.  All it saves are your settings and apps.  In fact, it hates your photos and videos, and that's why it prompts you to "restore" your phone to its original, pristine condition, before you sullied it with pictures of your filthy little urchins. 

So I lost over 800 pictures and videos of my girls.  But thank Little Baby Jesus, my NPR playlist was still intact, and my Words With Friends games had not been compromised.

Upon discovering that all my photos and videos had evaporated, I was bummed, but not surprised.  I've managed to lose all kinds of digital data: lesson plans, manuscripts, photos, you name it.  That's how I learn about things like "hard drives."

But this time, my wife was standing there when I made the discovery, and her visible disappointment and exasperation elevated the status of the misstep from "D-oh!" *palmface* to "Another of Life's Many Inextinguishable Regrets." 

These pictures and videos were not something that could be reproduced.  They represented a time of intense development in the girls, ranging from their first steps to their first words, to riding trikes and jumping on the bed while squealing streams of random nouns.  It was as if all the memories of one third of their existence had been wiped out.

Okay, maybe not all the memories. 

My wife has over 300 photos and videos from the same time-span in her identical iPhone.  And then there are the 600 shots still on the memory card of the DSLR.  Also, a couple hundred of the best pictures and videos from my iPhone exist online somewhere: whether in emails, blog posts, or Facebook albums.  Plus, there are probably another 500 shots on the hard drives of the shutterbugs among our friends and family. 

And then there are the photos and videos from the pre-iPhone, post-birth era, which number in the low four-digits.  So all told, there are probably about four thousand pictures and videos of our kids still intact. 

Four thousand.  And the kids have only been ex utero for about 570 days. 

How many pictures do your parents have of you?

I think there are about a hundred pictures of me in existence that cover ages zero through eighteen.  Granted, it was a little harder to take pictures back then, what with having to lug around the tripod made of lodgepole pines and the camera the size of a suckling pig and the woolen shroud and the gunpowder flash and all.  But as far as I know, nobody is feeling a nagging emptiness in their souls because there are no pictures of me eating my first corndog. 

So why should I feel crushed that we only have four thousand visual documents of our girls' lives so far?

The truth of the matter is that I don't even know what the hell we're supposed to do with all these pictures and videos.  I suppose there will come a day, maybe when the girls are intolerable tweens, if not sooner, when we'll want to take a regenerative walk down memory lane to a time when they were much cuter, friendlier, and less complicated.  But that doesn't happen much now. 

Oh, I look at pictures and videos of the kids, all right.  Lots of them.  Repeatedly.  Sometimes when the kids are right in front of me, live, but they aren't being as adorable as they were in the video. 

But I hardly ever look at anything more than a couple weeks old.  And when I do, my reaction is usually, "Meh...that's kind of cute, but I'd hardly call that walking, and her hair looks much better now than it did back then." 

I'm sure this golden age will end at some point.  It's like an economic bubble.  The cuteness just can't continue to increase at this rate forever.  One day I'll lament the passing of these good times. 

And I'm pretty sure, when that day comes, that the 75,000 photos and videos we will have accrued by then will satisfy my nostalgia.  I doubt whether the 800 lost images will make much of a difference.

But still...there was that one video...the one at the aquarium...where the girls were banging on the glass as a stingray swooped past them, and their giggling echoed in the dark background.  And they were wearing my favorite dresses.  I'll never get to see that one again. 

Dammit.

 

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Here's one from the new crop of videos: