sweetEEs: Mommy in the picture

This article makes me cry every time I read it (which is in the double digits now) and much more aware of capturing memories of my children with photographs that include me.

These words hit home in so many ways...

"Someday I want them to see me, documented, sitting right there beside them: me, the woman who gave birth to them, whom they can thank for their ample thighs and their pretty hair; me, the woman who nursed them all for the first years of their lives, enduring porn star-sized boobs and leaking through her shirts for months on end; me, who ran around gathering snacks to be the week's parent reader or planning the class Valentine's Day party; me, who cried when I dropped them off at preschool, breathed in the smell of their post-bath hair when I read them bedtime stories, and defied speeding laws when I had to rush them to the pediatric ER in the middle of the night for fill-in-the-blank (ear infections, croup, rotavirus). I'm everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me with them. Someday I won't be here -- and I don't know if that someday is tomorrow or thirty or forty or fifty years from now -- but I want them to have pictures of me. I want them to see the way I looked at them, see how much I loved them. I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect to love, but I am perfectly their mother."

Thank you Allison Tate for sharing this powerful message.
Thank you Nicci and Lisa for posting this article on Facebook for me to see.
Thank you Libby for capturing some one-on-one time with me and my littlest E.