Do You Have Printnesia?

I don’t want to scare you or anything but as it stands your children probably have no childhood memories.

Sure, you have taken them on wonderful holidays overseas or around our beautiful country, most likely Queensland where you had a *ahem* mild freak out on the Tower of Terror with your young ones revelling in delight at your newly discovered fear of heights, speed or being thrown up on by children other than your own, understandably. And there were many days when you said ‘screw housework’ then took them for a picnic at the park to feed ducks, eat ice cream and kick a ball around (if you haven’t done that yet DO IT!).

Or what about the days when you took them to the beach and their excitement could rival the Rod Laver Arena full of women getting massages and fed grapes from the Hemsworth brothers, Charlie Hunnam, Dwayne Johnson and other Hollywood hotties (Melbourne & Olympic Parks please make that happen). Despite your best efforts doing these things with your kids and more, there is not one thing you have done with them over the years of their young lives that they can look back on as a childhood memory.

Well actually there is, I am not exaggerating when I say there are thousands of awesome memories you have given your children but in a way, they have none. Perhaps you haven’t realised it yet so I am going to tell you what this missing childhood memory phenomena looks like…

I’m calling it Printnesia

Printnesia is forgetting to print a select number of memorable moments photographed from the 15,475 ‘moments’ taken of your children every day year and storing them into an actual, physical, tangible, get-sticky-fingers-all-over-it, embarrass them by showing it to their gf/bf photo album. You may be super awesome and back-up your photos to a computer, digital photo frame, hard drive or cloud storage on a regular basis but what if you’re not so organised? Shit happens. You can lose your smart phone before you had a chance to back up those only photos you have of your newborn, or your darling little mites could drop your phone into the toilet ‘to have a swim with Barbie’, or there could be a stuff-smashing tornado (it’s called a child) localized entirely within the confines of your study totally destroying your computer and hard drives taking ALL the photos you have ever taken, with it.

Shit. Happens.

Thinking about the evolution of technology and how quickly photography and the sharing of photos has evolved, I feel it is naïve to think your photos are safe unprinted because eventually your trusted photo storage devices will be old, phased out and may not be compatible or unable to sync with the new photo storage devices taking their place and could succumb to such disasters previously mentioned. I’m an old school kinda gal, not in a 1975 stepford wives kind of way but in a see it, experience it, feel it kind of way. I like the feel of turning the page in a book rather than flicking my finger across a screen, or the romance of stirring the sauce in my sauté pan using a wooden spoon rather than sticking it in a ‘thermie’ and pressing a button, that being said I love printed photos in photo albums. Although I understand and as I have already said, shit happens, and physical photo albums are not a complete failsafe I think photo albums are a safer alternative for storing and accessing photos. After all, there is always a fire-proof, water-proof, child-proof, life-proof, everything-proof safe to put them in if you REALLY wish to avoid ‘shit happening’.

I try my best to manage our photos, it’s a hard task as we take so many and don’t we all. I like to back them up to our computer at the very least on a monthly basis, then I sort them according to month and event and filter out all the repeat photos of the same shot only keeping the best of the bunch. The fun but hard part is picking which photos I would like to print.

Something I am doing for my son, and you may like to do for your children, is giving him a photo album of the year that was, each year for his birthday (yes there will be crap toys too don’t worry). It will be roughly 300-400 photos of any holidays or camping trips taken, days out, family events, their pets, their friends and just hanging out as a family being silly. Whilst it is not something he will appreciate in the early years, over time as we grow older and further apart in distance not love, when he moves into his own home, starts his own family and lives his own life this is when he will appreciate it the most, on the nights when he will pull out a photo album or three, looking through the pages and laughing showing his wife or life partner and his children the fun he had, or more likely the mischief he got up to, as a kid, and telling them the stories behind the photos, teaching them about their family tree, where they come from, where they belong and how important it is to be a family.

Today’s technology is meant to bring us closer together with the use of Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, email and everything else you can think of to connect and communicate more often and instantly but at the same time it is isolating us more and more with less actual, personal, face-to-face, physical interaction. Whilst photo albums are not the only way, the closeness they can bring by looking through, designing, sorting and putting them together with your family and friends is still so important to connect with the ones you love the most.

Do you need help sorting out your memories? Check these handy tips out!