Our first coloring book was a holiday, because of course it was. Holidays are the photogenic peaks of family life, and they earned their pages.
The second book is the one that surprised me.
We were choosing photos for it one evening when my middle one scrolled past a picture from an ordinary Tuesday in May. Her, at the bathroom mirror, grinning like a jack-o-lantern, holding up the first tooth she ever lost. “That one,” she said. “That has to be in it.”
Ordinary Tuesdays make
extraordinary pages.
{Tweet that.}
She was right, and it cracked the whole thing open. If the tooth got a page, what else deserved one? We went hunting through the year, and the year turned out to be full of them. The first-day-of-school photo at the front gate, backpack bigger than the child. The morning we brought the baby home in a hat that fit her like a bucket. The puppy’s first week, when he was small enough to sleep in a shoe. Nana’s seventieth, all of us squeezed onto one couch.
Milestone photos are strange creatures. We take them with ceremony, we might even print one for the grandparents, and then they sink into the camera roll with everything else. But to a kid, these are the plot points of their whole existence. The lost tooth was, at the time, front-page news in our house for a week.
Watching my daughter color that bathroom mirror scene taught me something. She narrated the entire saga while she worked. The wobbly weeks, the apple that finished the job, the tooth fairy’s frankly erratic exchange rate. She was documenting her own history, and she treated it with the seriousness of a museum curator, and I sat there quietly and learned things I’d already half-forgotten.
Kids get told, in a hundred small ways, which moments count. Fancy occasions get photographed. Fancy photographs get framed. When the page in front of them is their own gap-toothed grin on a nothing Tuesday, the message lands differently. Your life, the ordinary parts included, is worth keeping.
The holidays will keep getting their books around here. But so will the Tuesdays.
Outline Origins turns any photos into a coloring book, and holidays were only the start. First days, lost teeth, new pets, new siblings. If it mattered to your kid, it will make a wonderful page.
