When I visualize the ideal birthday photo, it's this one...the birthday child at the kitchen table, surrounded by family, with maybe a sibling standing close by to help blow out the candles at a moment's notice. The lights are dimmed and all eyes are on the child leaning precariously over their home-baked birthday cake. The child may be the only person in the photo, but you know that the family is looking on from just outside the frame.
Sometimes Mom is represented by an oddly detached torso and arm reaching in to present the cake, aflame, wax dripping onto the butter cream frosting.
When my youngest celebrated his third birthday earlier this month, I was posessed about getting this photo of him. We didn't do a big birthday party this year, and I was feeling a little guilty about that, so this was really my only chance to get him blowing out his candles.
These birthday moments come and go so very quickly. In my opinion, the only way to truly hold on to them is to memorialize them in a photograph. Sure, they stay alive in your memory, but it's never as vivid as the photograph that you can go back and relive time and again.
Just about every child has this kind of memory about their birthday. Even if, like my husband, you didn't have a party with your friends from school every year, you AT LEAST had some kind of celebration with cake or some other sweet treat and your immediate family. Gathering around the one piece of furniture that has the power and the capacity to hold the entire family together at one time is the ultimate symbol of celebrating the place a certain person holds in your family. The family dinner table is something that almost universally represents a family gathered as one unit.
I was fortunate to have grown up with this positive view of the family dinner table. As an adult, I know now that ideal hasn't been every child's reality. As a parent, to respect and take advantage of our ability to gather around our table at least once a day is one of my most closely held intrinsic values.
Happy Birthday, my sweet boy!
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