Thanksgiving Countdown, Day 13: Can You Picture That?

I'm grateful for pictures.

In the corn maze!

If you've been to my house, that's probably obvious. We have a few paintings, clocks, and knick-knacks. But the majority of the decor on our walls is photographs of our family and loved ones.

I prefer to take pictures myself, too. I'm not a professional photographer by any means, but I'm really good at getting natural smiles out of Ben and Evie. I feel like I have a pretty good natural talent for posing people, too. So, with a decent camera, my pictures turn out pretty well.

Evie's nine-year pictures :)

I never buy the school pictures they do every year. Evie always looks stiff and awkward. I definitely prefer to take her into the great outdoors and get some more natural-looking shots. I'm always happy to do it for other people, too, so they can have a picture that actually shows a piece of their child's personality.

My parents with their grandbabies

My Facebook page is filled with pictures as well. They might not be the most beautiful ones, the ones that are wall-worthy, but they all represent moments that were worth capturing. They're visual memories.

We also have a plethora of pictures in scrapbooks, and even more in a bin under my bed, waiting to be scrapbooked someday.

My brother proposing!

One of the reasons I love pictures so much is because they help us remember beautiful memories that we might otherwise forget. When I look through scrapbooks of my childhood, my time in college, when Ben and I were first together, or when Evie was a baby, all kinds of mostly-forgotten memories come flooding back.

Pictures help us remember the best times in our lives. When we look at them, we remember the good things, and they seem to far outweigh the bad.

I'm so grateful for modern technology that allows us to capture pictures in an instant, at almost any time or place. Even our phones have cameras now, and they're not too shabby!

Rafting trip in Moab

Do all the pictures people post online make it seem like their lives are unfairly perfect and lovely? Maybe. We don't really tend to post pictures of the bad times. But I don't think that's really such a big deal, as long as we recognize that a photo history is not a fully accurate depiction of a person's life. As long as we can keep in mind that these snapshots are exactly that - just a quick image of a brief moment in time - we can appreciate the joyful memories they represent.

"Carnival Day" at school

They allow us to look back on our lives and say, "I've been very blessed."

To able to see our lives from that kind of beautiful perspective is a wonderful blessing indeed.