One Man's Outtake is Some Mama's Treasure

One piece of advice I give to new moms...especially new moms of multiples...is to take lots of pictures of their kiddos while they're stationary. Once they can propel themselves, it's so hard to get a good picture!

Thank goodness for digital photography, though, right? I often take 20 or 30 shots, just to get one or two "keepers".

So two keepers out of 20 shots...my trusty calculator tells me I should be able to delete approximately 18 shots, right?

Not so easy, at least for this mama.

There is often something sweet, or cute, or funny, or memorable about every single picture. There is something precious to be found even in the blurry shot, the shadowed face, or the frowning baby.

I may not print them all, but I often have an awful hard time actually hitting the "delete" button to erase my babies' outtakes.

Here, for example, is one of my favorites from Halloween. It may look like a botched photo op to most, but I see my theatrical Baby A doing a very heartfelt impression of a kitty cat (because she's wearing a kitty cat shirt, of course). Baby B is giggling at her, knowing Mommy really wants them to quit the animal noises for a minute and pose already!

Here's a very blurry shot of Baby A. I just couldn't bear to erase that huge smile, though, knowing she was scrambling off the couch to run over to me. (The girls can hardly stand for me to be sitting on the floor and them not be on top of me.)

And while this may not be the most flattering shot of Baby B, it just makes me laugh. She was laughing at herself, being silly in her hat. She often laughs so hard she falls over, and this was a split second or two before her laughter-induced crumble.

I guess it's just one of the many things that makes us mamas, loving every square inch of our babies...outtakes and all.