Jen gave me a digital picture frame for Christmas that’s much cooler than our old one. Since then, I’ve been going through my pictures (at least 2,000 of them) and picking out the ones I want to display. My nephew and his wife recently started a family and they have two kids, Ava – 3 and Nolan – 1. I easily have 600 pictures of the two of them already and their young lives just got started. Most people reading this and I are lucky if there are a half dozen baby pictures of us in existence. I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad’s camera got stolen or broken right before my little sister and I came along. I think the conversation between them must’ve gone something like this:

MOM: ‘Now that we’ve added Jimmy and Ellen to the family, isn’t it time we replace our camera?’
DAD: ‘Nah, I don’t think so. We have plenty of pictures of the other kids and kids that age pretty much all look the same. Besides, they’ll never know.’
MOM: ‘Good points, they never occurred to me. OK, never mind.’

Ava and Nolan’s parents are real good about posting short videos of the kids to Snapchat and sharing them with all of us nearly every day. Sometimes they post multiple times a day. We really enjoy watching them, it’s like seeing them grow up right before our eyes in real-time. When we get to see the kids in person (they live in south St. Louis County), they’re still pretty timid and shy around me and my wheelchair (by ‘timid and shy’ I mean ‘terrified’) but they’re starting to warm up to me, though. I have that effect on little kids. They either: stare at me openly while slack-jawed and mouths opened in amazement or they start wailing uncontrollably like I poked them in the eye and they turn away and bury their faces in their mother’s shoulders.

There are several other kids in our family and we love them all the same. It’s just that when they were all little, things like Snapchat or just social media in general weren’t really around or as widely used, so we didn’t “see” them all grow up.

Here are a few pictures that made the “digital frame cut”. What’s not fun about looking at pictures of people you might kinda know or not know at all?  Am I right? 

So, in the words of Heath Ledger as “The Joker” in The Dark Knight:
‘Here. We. Go.’:

(Note: It took me a pretty long time to figure out how to add pictures to this post, definitely a lotlonger than it should have. Kept having to bug Jen for help. WordPress has 700 bells and whistles that I’ll never use or want to use, I’d be happy to become somewhat proficient with using 4 of the basic ones.)

OK, I need to wrap this one up because I promised myself that I would keep these under a couple pages. That promise is quickly going the way of the New Year’s Resolutions I made.

Auf Wiedersehen, bis zum nächsten Mal,
(Goodbye, until next time)

– Jim 

P.S.  It’s fun messing around with Google Translate!