I set up my camera and tripod and set the timer for ten seconds. I brought the kids in to look at the red blinky light (which they loved) and got a few pics of all of us, them looking lovely and smiling at the camera (or the red blinky light on the camera) and me looking like I’m trying not to think about how the sun just went behind clouds and now the light is gone and the room is too dark. It was just a practice run, and I’ll try again.

I’m a perfectionist, and I don’t like to share things that haven’t passed my rigorous examination of “worth revealing to the general public.” (On a related note, even things that pass this exam almost immediately fail the same exam after their having been revealed–it’s just part of the cycle. There’s always next time and I’ll do better, then. I hope.) I don’t want to put motives in God’s mind, but I have a sneaking suspicion that that perfectionism is the reason why I have three strong-willed boys three-and-under.

To show that I’m learning, I’m sharing a fragment of a photo from a practice run, where the room suddenly went dark as the sun ducked behind clouds, and the two-year-old suddenly dashed out of the picture, and I have a comical look on my face because the baby started crying just as the red blinky light started pulsating and I’m holding his pacifier in his mouth and saying, “Don’t start crying now!” And he did, anyway.

What I like about it is that my hands look somehow weathered and older than they really are. They are the hands of a persevering, semi-recovering perfectionist. It’s not a very good photograph, but it’s a very real one.