The first good digital camera I had was a Sony Mavica, an unwieldy dinosaur that stored photos on 3.5″ floppy disks. One floppy held ten high-quality photos, and at the rate I took photos, I usually needed quite a few. On our weekend family hikes I’d stuff stacks of them in zip-lock baggies, mingling with the granola bars and water bottles and sunscreen in my day pack. Later at home, kids in bed, I’d download photos, disk by disk, onto the computer, oohing and aahing over the good ones, double-checking to see the photos were all safely tucked in on my C drive, then formatting each floppy to await the next hike.  Laborious, yes. But really just a tiny investment in time for the reward of revisiting moments like this:

That Mavica also took video, a feature I didn’t use very often. I was still getting my still shot feet wet, and a floppy held only 30 seconds or so of video – what I thought was negligible amount of time in our lives.  I’m sorry now that I didn’t play with that feature more; I recently came across that handful of Mavica videos and realized that 30 seconds was just about perfect, a sweet, short, snippet of our everyday lives. I strung them together to make what I thought would be a cute little video but got this tearjerker instead. It’s a mother’s prerogative, I believe, to take photographs and memories and create a takeaway moment, a few minutes that illustrates what I think almost every single day: it just doesn’t get any better than this.

The snippets that follow are from the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, Big Sur, and just hanging around the house – everyday moments of playfulness and love that make this whole roller coaster ride worthwhile. The song is Jack Johnson’s “Do You Remember.” I hope you enjoy!