Then the sub lapsed and I stopped using Flickr and switched to Facebook. Flickr was great and Facebook kinda sucked, but Facebook was free and I'm not really a photographer so image fidelity wasn't top of the list, plus FB was convinient because 99% of the people I wanted to show stuff to were already there. Okay + Free trumped Spendy + Great for me. I'd check Flickr every so often, but without paying them you could only see your last 200 pics, which wasn't very useful. So FB it was.
Cut to last month and the big Flickr redesign.
Attitudes are mixed, as with any change to anything online, but I am a wholehearted advocate for New Flickr. Not because of any design changes, not because of the huge storage boost, but because I CAN GET AT ALL MY PICS AGAIN. For free! So I'll be migrating back to Flickr- score one for the redesign.
How does this relate to Fuss....well, there is a huge trove of baby pics on Flickr, my gifted sub coinciding with his birth. And there's this widget that lets you connect your Flickr account to your Roku box. The other night, messing around with things, I did just that and we sat on the couch watching Fuss' baby album on our television.
You know that kids age fast. Not even in dog years, but in Mayfly years. You *know* this because even living with them you can almost see it day to day, like heat distortion at the edge of your vision. What's that weird blur I can almost make out? Oh, just my child growing before my eyes.
But watching a slideshow of a couple hundred baby pictures taken over the course of a year is like a walking blindly into an ice cold swimming pool.
Oh SHHHHHHHHHHI........
Here is Cousin Fiend holding him the day after he was born, and she was LITTLE. This seems like yesterday to me, but she's about half the size she is now. She isn't even a little girl anymore, she's just a GIRL. And she's the age Fuss is right now. And he's the size of a loaf of bread, but when I looked in on him this morning he occupies more than half the length of a California King mattress. What the EFF.
Pictures of him in his buzzy chair, which it seemed he would never leave behind, breakfast pics in his high chair, ditto...both totally forgotten until that night. He was so small, and now he's so huge, and surely it wasn't that long ago, just a few...years.
It's nothing I didn't already know, but such an explicit visual parade of growth was a violent shock.
A reminder that all the crap I'm worried about right now, all the insurmountable, irritating conflicts we have about whatever, it's all going to be gone before I realize it, just like his high chair, just like his buzzy chair. And all the little things I love about him right now will be gone too, his absolute love for his stuffed animals, his joy for small things like smashing ice blocks on the deck or staring at gopher holes.
He'll still be himself, but those things will evolve into different problems and loves and I know I'll miss them, even as I delight in whatever new horizons he finds to explore.
That's why having a child is hard. The practical stuff is work and it wears you out, but the heartache is in how every day little bits of them get away from you, always faster than you expect and sometimes faster than you can stand.
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