People love to rag on photos of kids on Facebook, but a mom who posted pictures of a baby girl the other day wasn't oversharing. She was trying to reconnect stolen photos to the mom who'd been missing them for nine years! And guess what ... it worked!
Ah! The miracle of Facebook! Connecting moms and priceless memories once again.
Hey now, imagine this was you!
How many photos have you taken of your baby since birth? One hundred? Two hundred? One hundred thousand million gazillion (that's how many my daughter insists I've taken of her)? Now imagine they were all gone ... in an instant. I think I had a heart attack just thinking about that.
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It's what happened to Ann Perry-Smith, a Canadian mom whose car was broken into not long after her daughter's birth. The thief took pretty much every photo she had of the little girl.
Fast forward nine years, and a mom named Helen Maslyk found a canister of film in the woods near a highway (her family had pulled over because of car trouble). She somehow managed to track down a photo center that developed the pictures and put 'em on Facebook, and eventually they were spotted by a friend of Ann's.
It's a picture perfect ending.
I know, I know, very punny. But I know I'd be praying for someone to return the photos to me if I were in Ann's situation.
Maybe it's because I'm a photographer that I place such a high value on photographs. Or maybe it's just because I'm human.
But with an almost-8-year-old on my hands, I confess I still love looking back at her baby pictures, perhaps more so than any of the photos I've taken in her nearly 8 years on this planet. Sometimes they make me wistful and a little weepy, but they also fill me up with such love for this little person who I've managed to keep alive (!). To me the photos represent not just the first few months of life, but how far we've come too, the beautiful young lady she's turning into, the wicked sense of humor she's developing.
Losing that would break my heart.
Do you look at the photos of your baby? How do they make you feel?
Image via Jeanne Sager