Do your kids steal your camera from you as soon as you put it down to sneakily fill your camera roll with photographs and selfies? No? Is it just my camera roll that looks this…?

I usually delete them all immediately. I don’t want all of those pictures filling up the memory on my phone.

Well the past few months I’ve been backing up all of our photographs onto Google Photos. We’ve had hard drive back-ups for years, but I’m hyper-sensitive about losing all our memories somehow, so I decided to back everything up in multiple locations. Years and years worth of photographs.

In doing so, I realized how we’ve lost the art of the snapshot. In the social media age, we filter and edit. We crop to get the right perspective. We use apps (or more than one app) to get the color perfect. And we delete the photos that aren’t just right.

But our kids don’t. They take photos of the moment they see, the experiences they are having. They document life as it is.

Going through years of photographs, revisiting all the ones I didn’t share on social media but also didn’t delete, those are the photographs that show this beautiful life I have been given.

Even with the laundry piled up, even with dishes on the counters, even when the kids were running around in their underwear. Those photographs make me smile.

And now, with my children grabbing my camera every chance they get, my camera roll is filled with photographs of how they see life. And yes, there are a lot of photographs of me…that I don’t particularly love. Case in point:

Photographs that I wouldn’t post because I don’t like the way my stomach looks or the lines that can be seen in my face or my makeup isn’t perfect (or even on). I used to delete those because I didn’t like the way I looked in them. But what I didn’t realize was that I was deleting my kids memories of me. This is the me they will remember. The every day me. The no-makeup, hair in a ponytail, yoga pants me. And they don’t care.

Our kids don’t see the pounds we gained. They don’t notice that we didn’t contour our makeup or our frizzy hair. All they see is the mom they love. The mom they want to take a picture of…or better yet, with.

So I stopped deleting those pictures. You don’t have to post them for all to see (there’s one my daughter wanted me to post here but I adamantly said no!). You don’t have to keep the blurry ones or duplicates. But I challenge you to stop deleting all of them. In fact, I even let my kids “favorite” them on my phone, because they like looking back at them over and over.

And when I look at those pictures, I’ve learned to love them just as much as the dressed-up, posed ones. In some cases even more. Because sometimes they capture moments that you couldn’t capture on your own. Like this one my daughter took.

Let your kids take the photos. And save them. One day, you’ll cherish them. And so will your children. Because the beautiful YOU they will remember.

If this post touched you in any way, I encourage you to share it with your friends. This is a message every one (especially women) need to hear!