Like I Have Time For This?

When you upload photos from our camera, they appear in the order they were originally taken. Yesterday, after uploading a smallish batch, I found another folder my husband uploaded that contained the hundred or so photos we’d taken since moving east. It covered everything from leaving our old house, to the temporary apartment we lived in for a month to moving into this little rental house. Naturally, I started flipping through them…in order…and pretty soon I came to the following sequence:

Here, my husband had managed to catch my 3-year-old in the act of falling off her bike. And when your little child takes a fall, you naturally

a) call out to her “ooops, you’re okay” and hope she’ll just brush it off,
b) rush to her, pick her up, check for bleeding, consider a trip to urgent care, or
c) take a picture of her pain.

Here, my husband has clearly chosen OPTION C. 

Here, my daughter, realizing that her father has chosen OPTION C, is running into the house where her mother, who is eternally doing dishes and folding laundry (and wishing for the upteenth time that the girls would STOP taking all the clean matching socks from their drawers to use as pretend diapers for all the beanie babies), will drop whatever it is she’s doing and immediately administer OPTION B.

While OPTION B is occuring inside, here’s what happens next outside, according to the evidence on the digital camera:

Here my 6-year-old, who has witnessed the whole thing, is giving my husband THAT LOOK. You know the look I mean. The look that (if I raise her right) she will someday give her own husband when he does something like this. The look that says: “nice” (and says it in the same tone that the pelican sitting on the open sea said to the other pelican when it looked like he passed some gas in Finding Nemo.)

So, while one daughter is inside receiving OPTION B and the other daughter is giving him THE LOOK, my husband’s next thought clearly must have been:

“Oh, look. A tree.”

because that’s what he took a picture of next. And immediately on the heels of that, he must have thought we needed YET ANOTHER picture of our cars, because let’s face it, you can’t ever have enough pictures of the minivan and the old Honda:

I’m gonna print this one out in high resolution and get it framed and hang it up with the other dozen or so pictures of our old Dodge truck. Oh, look, there’s our old cat hiding underneath the minivan. She’s kind of a wimp, but we’ve had her for 14 years, so we put up with it.

And for those of you who think my husband has been roasted enough, here’s the next picture in the sequence:

Here, with OPTION B duly administered, my 3-year-old has returned to the outdoors and gotten back on her bike and is ready to ride again.

The camera doesn’t lie, my friends. Keep it in mind.