I’ve been seeing this meme around lately and because I’m never one to wait to for an invitation I’m showing up uninvited and I brought a few friends. Hope that’s ok.

(Actually this is a total lie. I’m totally not a party-crashing kind of person and I would be absolutely mortified to do this in real life but hello, it’s a blog, and no one gives a crap about memes!)

So the meme involves finding your sixth photo folder and then showing the sixth picture from that folder. Since I’m a mac-whore I translated that into mac and made it work in iPhoto and this is the picture, taken on our first digital camera which probably had all of half a mega-pixel:

This is a picture of my daughter from around November 2003 and it’s actually the 5th and not the 6th picutre but I figured you’d forgive me. They’re basically the same pose except in the other one Avery had one bright red devil-eye and one normal eye. The scene is this: I was taking advantage of one of the few moments of solace we’d had from crying in the 4 months since she was born and trying to capture a happy moment and taking pictures of her adorable smooshy self sitting on our wingback chair in the living room seemed like a good way to do that.

In truth, the majority of the first few months she looked more like this:

So chill-inducing precious, right? That’s from the same folder.

In hindsight, I am wondering if maybe she was scared of the bizarre assortment of freaky animals hanging over her bed and stuffed in every corner and crevice.  If I was stuck in a cage with some of those beasties I might cry, too! I’m not sure if it is better to think that I was just a terribly insensitive mother or that she was the most miserable, unhappy child ever to be birthed by a clueless mother.

Oh and since we’re poking around in that folder let’s take a closer look at that hair (and by closer I mean not really any closer because the crappy old digital pictures don’t allow much zooming and cropping):

Hard to believe that hair turned into this in a matter of months, isn’t it?

Look at those cheeks. Nom, nom, nom.