I read this tweet the other day and couldn’t stop laughing:
“Had an argument with my 7yo today and she threatened to film me with the flip camera and put it on YouTube. And she totally would.”
Thankfully, my 5-year-old is still figuring out how to manipulate her Fisher-Price digital camera, so any potential photographic evidence she plans to use against me is currently relegated to still images only.
Be that as it may, her photo experiments have already been the subject of raised eyebrows, concerned stares, and whispers between teachers at her school, all thanks to her voyeuristic, stalker paparazzi picture-taking practices.
For whatever reason (let’s call it, boredom), my kid loves to sneak up on me when I’m engrossed in daily chores. Instead of standing on the porch photographing bugs, birds, or the myriad other fist signs of spring, my daughter prefers aiming her chunky camera at me… doing the dishes, folding laundry, vacuuming, dusting, cooking and mopping floors.
“Look at all these pictures of Mommy not playing with me,” my budding Ansel Adams whines to my mom, as she delicately pushes the image back and image forward buttons on her digital recording device. “All she ever does is not play with me.”
Never mind that I just spent four hours with the kid playing 900 games of Memory, Dog Bingo and Guess Who?
And all that laundry I’m folding… I’ll give you three guesses, which member of our household regularly fills two hampers in a single day, because changing her clothes every four hours is a habit she simply can’t break.
The kvetching to my mom I can handle. It’s the spontaneous photo updates my daughter shares with her kindergarten teacher that I can live without.
After being stalked by my mini pap one too many times, I suggested (in a not-so friendly tone) that she use her creativity to snap shots that didn’t feature her mother scrubbing blue Powerade from the floor where one very greasy-handed little girl spilled it… because she didn’t listen to her mommy and grabbed the plastic juice cup before she wiped her greasy pizza paws and that’s why I’m on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor!
I figured she had heeded my advice when I made it into the bathroom without having to pose for a single photo.
Then, three minutes into my post-workout shower I heard a little voice call out, “Mommy?”
Feeling guilty about the whole pizza/Powerade incident, I immediately pulled back the shower curtain just enough for her to see that everything was fine and to reassure her that there were no bad feelings between us.
However, I never got the chance to wax poetic about how everyone makes mistakes and accidents happen all the time, because as soon as I popped my head out of the shower I was met by a blinding flash. My pint-sized paparazzo had struck again.
“GOTCHA!” she screamed.
She ran out of the bathroom laughing hysterically and kept on giggling each time she looked at her prize-winning shot.
“Well, you were the one who told her to use her creativity,” my mother reminded me after I regained my sight.
Truth be told, it is a rather amusing shot. It doesn’t feature anything more than my wet hair, soaked shoulders and a shocked expression that could easily make a statue crack a smile.
The surprise photo shoot was the source of laughter in our home for a while, until my daughter went to school and shared her picture-taking adventures with her teacher.
“What did you do this weekend?” my daughter’s kindergarten teacher asked my bouncing baby girl, as I dropped her off at her classroom door the following Monday.
“I took pictures of my mommy in the shower!” she exclaimed.
Needless to say, my daughter won’t be getting a flip cam anytime soon.