Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Picture Perfect

Abel Keogh

As I parent, I know that one day one of my kids will leapfrog me when it comes to technology and understand how to work a computer, video game, or some device that hasn’t been invented yet better than their old man.

However, I never thought that they’d be four years old when they did it.

Our oldest is fascinated by cameras. He loves taking pictures with my digital camera (gulp!) or my cell phone camera. And I like looking at the photographs he takes because it’s interesting to see how he views the world.


Our Kitchen Sink

(This is what our kitchen sink looks like from his perspective.)

Usually he’ll take pictures with my cell phone camera until the memory is full. Later I’ll go through the pictures, save the one or two I like, and delete the rest.

On Saturday I was going through the latest round of photos and noticed that they some of them had some special effects added to them.

Cat Special Effects


I called our oldest over and asked if he had taken that picture. With quite a bit of pride in his voice, he told me that he had done that.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Push seven,” he said.

I pushed seven. Nothing happened.

“It’s not working,” I said.

“You have to start at the beginning,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Obviously frustrated with his old man’s inability to work a simple cell phone camera, our four year old took the camera from me and in a few moments was pushing the seven button and scrolling through a list of special effects.

“See?” he said.

“Wow. That’s amazing. How did you figure that out?”

“I just learned it,” he said.

He scrolled through the special effects and held the camera up so he could see me.

“Smile, Dad,” he said.

I smiled.

And he took a picture.

Abel's Smile

Entry cross-posted here.

Monday, May 19, 2008

The Call of the Creek

The Call of the Creek

By Kimberly Jensen

The water tingled as I stepped into the cold current. Within minutes my ankles were bright red but I kept walking downstream, gingerly stepping on each rock, gaining my footing and then moving on. I heard a splash and then a thud and turned around to find my sun-kisssed sister on her bottom, laughing as the water lapped over her shorts. The fall had splashed droplets of water onto her face and her slightly wet bangs hung over her deep set blue eyes. Those eyes were the color of the summer sky and they sparkled as she laughed. I went to her and gave her a hand and a hoist and we laughed together as we continued our journey down the creekbed. The sound of the rippling water brought me back to the present as I watched my own sun-kissed daughter walk down the creek and fall onto the rocks, scraping her elbow. She laughed as she stood back up, showing me her newly acquired injury. I stood on the bridge watching her play with her middle school friends. I had walked down to the creek just to check out the water level and make sure it wasn't running too quickly. There may be video games, ipods, dvds and cell phones in today's middle school years, but for today, there is just the sun, the water, good friends, giggles and the call of the creek.