The Grind

I made the mistake of reading through some old posts tonight. Hard to believe only a few years ago I was writing about Andres at YMCA soccer, Celia crawling around, and my feelings about becoming a dad for the third time. They have all grown so much. And soon, I will have been a father for a decade. That's certainly something, isn't it?

I've been searching for something to write about for a few weeks but haven't happened onto much. At some point, I may write about turning 40, though that's a complicated post that I'm not sure I want to explore yet. I do want to write about Andres turning 10. I have tried to cover some of the kids' activities, but there's only so much I want to write about soccer.

The truth is that most weekends now are a grind. Not a bad grind--just a predictable onslaught of sports and activities that leave little time for much else. All three kids are playing soccer. Celia does Irish step. And I'm also committed, too--I run a couple of ultimate programs in Lexington on Sunday afternoon. Everyone is busy doing something.

With all this going on, it's tough to find things that are either new or interesting to write about. Each weekend seems like a facsimile of the last one.

And for now, I think that's ok. A few years ago, our weekends were scheduled around naptimes. That was no picnic--basically, if something wasn't done by 1pm, then it wasn't getting done. And a few years from now, I imagine we'll be traveling a lot more for soccer tournaments, or ultimate tournaments, or whatever it is that Lucia actually starts to do.

But one unintended consequence of having these packed weekends is that I'm taking far fewer pictures of the kids than I used to. The big exception to this is Andres' soccer games--but I shoot those because I want to become a better action shooter, and also because it's less stressful than just sitting and watching. Lots of weekends come and go with activities and small moment and no pictures or videos to remember them by. It's sad, because that's something I used to do well in the old days--just capturing life as we were living it, and then writing about it after the kids went to bed.

The trick now, I think, is to find the novelty and newness in our current lives, even as work/school/weekend schedules become routine. Video may be the best way to do this. The kids have enjoyed the brief video interviews that I have shot, and if I continue to do them, I can see them becoming more and more authentic as the novelty of being in front of the camera wears off. Photographs will still be my favorite, but I'm coming to the conclusion that while photos can capture an emotion perfectly, they also tell an incomplete story.

So now to execute this plan. I need to find time to do it. There are more soccer games tomorrow (yes, it's almost the weekend again), so maybe it's time to break out the video. Or I guess I could put the cameras away and just enjoy a weekend...but where's the fun in that?