Baby love

Since my daughter was born, we have been fanatical about taking her picture. Every time she does anything, we take a picture.

When I got pregnant with Ryan, my mom warned that we probably wouldn't take as many pictures of Ryan as we did Sophia. Well, in his first 24 hours of life, we took more than 200 pictures of our new little guy. The only difference between having one and two children is that I don't have as much time to share as many pictures as often with my family.

Over the weekend, we got a new camera, so we took this opportunity to back up the photos on our computer. We have more than 3,000 pictures chronicling the lives of our children.

Our pictures range from playing at the park to "photo shoots" at the dinner table. If Ryan is playing on the floor looking particularly cute, we pull out the camera. Sophia has a cute outfit on or she lets me put barrettes in her hair, out pops the camera.

From the day Sophia was born , that is about 5 pictures per day … of the kids. Sophia runs up to the camera every time it comes out and says "Cheese." She loves the camera and is always performing for it. Ryan is still little, but we're working on him.

Every single morning, we dress Sophia and she models her outfit for her Daddy. Little boy clothes are not nearly as cute as little girl's, but we make sure Ryan knows that he looks super cute too.

Am I training my children to be vain and narcissistic, or just proud of how they look? We're going for proud.

I think my own parents have maybe 500 pictures of our entire family. My mom is always "mentioning" that we don't have any studio pictures of the kids. The only "professional" photo I have of Sophia is her school photo and it's cute, but not the best. She looks … concerned. When you take so many pictures, you are bound to get a really great picture. A picture, in my opinion, that's better than Sears or the Picture People could ever take.