Memories, Ramblings, and Instagram

The only way I know when anything happened is by these blog archives. Or sorting through a digital photo album and making a note of the date/time stamp on a photo. So, I'm adding this now because it feels like a milestone I'll want to remember. About a month ago, Laurel got her first real haircut. We've been trimming her bangs ourselves, and once had our hair stylist do a quick evening out, but this was her first real salon trip. She liked getting her hair washed, and was fairly cooperative with keeping her head held a certain way. She's still a long haired child, though. I don't remember when she got her first tooth, other than it was early and there were two of them and then there weren't anymore for a long time. But if I look back on this blog, I can sort of piece together her story from the pictures. There's a digital imprint of her now, a shadow that can't be erased even if I wanted to. What did we do before all this clicking? M was carefully constructing mix tapes, to last exactly as long as the sides allowed, and with cover art. They were pretty fabulous in my memory, but when I found them in the basement I couldn't listen to them because we don't have a tape deck anymore. He's had a huge music collection for as long as I've known him, but now it's funny to think what took up a whole wall of book cases is now on an iPod in the glove compartment of our car (25,000 songs, baby. You'll run out of road before you run out of tunes). I'm not nostalgic for a time before the internet, but occasionally I want it to go away. Do you remember the first time you got jealous over somebody's dreamy Instagram feed? Instagram makes a cup of coffee look beautiful. Nobody's children ever have jam smeared on their mouth, of if they do, it looks artistic and does not have laundry fuzz stuck to it. I installed Instagram on my phone last week and was immediately infatuated with all the little filters and fuzzies, but at the same time, it killed some of the magic for me. You can blot out all of the imperfection from the reality of your life. Blur it, retro-ize it. Like in this last photo, M and Laurel look like they're in some kind of tropic paradise. And they are, kind of. I mean it's Key Largo after all. But what the photo does not reveal is that we're at a Hampton Inn on the side of a highway, and the beach is hard to walk on because there's a lot of pointy rocks and shells and we can't see the manatees we've been promised anywhere. But who wants to preserve the imperfections of life? I think the difference now is all the sharing and comparing. Too much Instagram popping up on your phone screen can mess with your mind. You gotta turn that stuff off and look around your own imperfect but fabulous life.