Posted by Anthony
How much would you pay to have your baby photos? How much would you give to keep the photos that you already have of your children? Baby photos are something that most of us take for granted. Even if it’s just a few, most of us are able to look at baby photos of ourselves and glance back through time to when we had pudgy cheeks, no hair, and didn’t like pureed peas.
If you’re like me, you’re even luckier to have been your mom’s first child (as well as the first grandchild and first GREAT grandchild). There are so many baby photos of me that you could almost make a flipbook from birth through age two. If you are already a parent, perhaps you understand why my parents were so zealous with the camera, even back in the early 1980s, when you had to buy actual film and then pay to have it developed and the photos printed.
Today, with a camera in everyone’s pocket, photos of babies, or any other of life’s wonders, are easy to come by and easy to create. Indeed, with some phones, if you just happen to hold your finger on the shutter button for too long, you’ll end up with 30 pictures of your ice cream cone before you realize what you’ve done.
Duck face education status: unsuccessful.
Since we launched our Indiegogo campaign this past weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about baby photos. I’ve been looking through old photos that I’ve taken with my phone—photos that I’ve taken just because I could and because it doesn’t cost me anything to take 40 photos of something. Like trying to teach a friend’s baby how to make a duck face. Or a bunch of photos of a flag blowing in the wind, hoping that just one of them will turn out right. Most of us have so many photos that we don’t even look at all of them any more.
We all take for granted that we can have photos of our children, of their first birthdays, and their first day of school, and their college graduation. It’s so easy to take a photo today and it’s essentially free. It’s essentially free unless you, like us, face a challenge to starting your family. For us, that challenge comes from the fact that we happen to be two men, in love and married, and ready for the next chapter of our life together. Because of that, we face a much longer road to starting our family than many others.
For us, there actually is a price on all of the photos that we’ll take of our future children. It feels impossible to put put a price tag on those future memories, but the reality is that no matter how we start our family, we have to make a down payment. And it’s not a down payment that we could come up with on our own.
We’ve had some people ask us why we chose to be so public with our journey and why we chose to start a crowdfunding campaign for such a private matter. It wasn’t an easy decision. But when I think about all of the future baby photos that we’ll have, photos of our children exploring the world and learning to love and care for it and for everything in it, I know that I would do anything to make it happen, no matter the cost.
How much are baby photos worth to you?