Take more pictures!

"Take more pictures!" Is what I repeatedly say to my pregnant friends. Take lots of pics! Document the journey, you will miss your bump when it's gone! Weekly I message my bestie for the bump pic, yet here I am 17 weeks pregnant with only two pictures. Two! So today I am reminding myself to TAKE MORE PICTURES!

I don't necessarily mean pictures for your Instagram or Facebook. I enjoy watching the progression of friends' pregnancies and never before met social media women I follow, growing and glowing. However, I mean for ourselves, our children, and grandchildren when they grow up, our memories. The English adage 'A picture is worth a thousand words' is so real. We will always have our stories; however, there is something about visuals that are so emotive. Small details we may have forgotten come flooding back to us when we see an image. And when we are no longer physically on earth, our pictures will remain.

My mum kept photo albums. Her bookshelf's bottom row was where they stayed, with a month and year, sometimes just a year noted on the spine. Right there easy access for me to pick up and have a flick through. I remember as a little girl I would always love to see my mum in her trendy 80's fashions before she had me, and then my parents punting in Cambridge, an ugly maternity dress on and her belly swollen with an eight-month me inside her. These pictures never got old for me, and to this day, it is still an activity I enjoy, looking through her photo albums.

Today where everything is digital, and all available images online look so perfect, it is so common for us to delete our memories. Rewrite our history. Oh, I don't look good there let me delete it. My nose is shiny, and I'm frowning, my arm looks fat. The list goes on. Then there are the lost phones non backed up pictures, broken laptops. So many memories gone. Aesthetic perfection is not the be-all and end-all in the grand scheme of things. Granted, we all like to look our best, and when posting pictures, we choose our favourites with the 'good' angles, but not all photos are only for social media. What about our family albums? If we are lucky enough to reach a ripe old age, I'm sure we will not be looking back at our youth and vibrant life, at a time when we were bringing forth more life, worrying about a pimple or an out of place hair?

When I came off Facebook over ten years ago, I was going through my old pictures, cringing at the outfits and skinny eyebrows and over-tanned foundation - delete, delete, delete! My youngest brother said to me; you shouldn't erase your history like that you know. And he was so right! Now I would love to look and cringe over some 2007 pictures, but they are gone.

So with pregnancy, it is not all about the perfectly curated bump timeline on your Instagram feed, although those are also wonderful. It is about the everyday moments, the friends, family and children who shared your days. The swollen feet and oiled up bellies, the progression of the Linea Negra and stretch marks. All wonderful memories of bringing life into the world and the incredible journey of a woman's body.

When I was pregnant with my son two years ago, I documented everything and posted nothing. I now have thousands of wonderful and random photos to be made into albums. Videos to be edited into a montage, and good intentions to do it 'soon'. Today I will start to do the same with my baby girl, make a little video with her big brother, telling her what we are doing on her 17th week in the tummy and take some pictures on this crisp sunny day and maybe even post on the gram! And when I put him to bed, I will start making his pregnancy album so when my children are a bit older, they can look through and enjoy as I did through my mother's albums.

Note to self: Take more pictures!