The Magical Photo Box | Southern MN & Twin Cities Family Photographer | ID Photography

"I bet you have a bunch of photos hanging around your house."  One of the stylists commented. A guilty look slides down my face as we sit chatting in their salon.

'Oddly enough" I say "I don't."

As I sit here now I can count the seven images I have printed to display for my family to enjoy.

One is a wedding photo of the hubs and I. There are three 5x7s of each of the boys from two summers ago. I have two modern float wraps of our family from…yep, fall two years ago and the other is of my oldest two children when they were respectively two years and six months old.

So judge me guilty as charged. As a photographer even I struggle to print my images in large form for display. Because let’s face it, as a photographer you all KNOW I have more photos than these of my kids. They just squirreled away on my hard drives.

But I do have a little secret. Every six months or so I pick some of my favorite images of our documented moments together and print them. Nothing fancy, some are from local box stores; others are from a professional printing lab. But all of them are stored away in the Magic Photobox.

It’s nothing special. It’s a dark green with a prairie flower print scheme.

But I call it the Magic Photobox because when my boys open it every once in a while they release the magic of memories and they love to relive the feelings of these moments. Constantly tapping my shoulder saying "Mommy! Remember when?!?" and then the spend a good hour or so shifting through the all the images pointing and chattering about people they love who are in the photos, insisting that EVERY baby photo we have is them because that stage they really were carbon copies of each other.

But what it made me realize is that the age of the "scrapbook" is fading. But I remember the same feelings of excitement, wonder and curiosity my kids show when opening their magic photo box that took hold of me whenever I would look at my Grammy's scrapbooks. She had one for each one of her kids and grandkids.

So the point of me writing this is, yes, traditional styles of keeping and documenting our lives and milestones may not be the same. And sometimes we get too busy and forget all those downloaded photos of our kid’s cuteness, but take time to make your memories easy to store and look at. You don't have a huge photo wall of image that has been inspired by Pinterest. But you can have a little box that your kids dive into; put their sticky kid hands on as they celebrate the lives they have lived thus far.