The other day I was looking through old photos and it occurred to me how much has changed since the days of film. I remember when 24 exposures on a roll of film were precious, yet now I carry more than 24,000 photos with me on my phone.  As I thumbed through stack after stack of photos, I came across a picture from Christmas morning when I was 8 or 9.  It was taken from a balcony that opened to the living room below giving a birds eye view of everything.  It was a disaster with wrapping paper and packages everywhere.  My sister and I received bright pink bean bags that year and they stood out among the mess.  We all had crazy morning hair and mismatched pajamas and the excitement on our faces was genuine. That was an epic Christmas and the memory is forever preserved thanks to that photo. Compare that to my children’s Christmas morning photos and you’ll find our family in matching pajamas with combed hair posing in front of the Christmas tree with our adorable dog, forced smiles and nothing out of place in the background.  We don't wear matching pajamas the other 364 days of the year or roll out of bed with flawless hair to walk downstairs to a magazine worthy living room, but for some reason my photos give the impression that we woke up like that.  It's like I'm getting ready to list my home and family for sale and all the clutter has to be removed and the background improved and if it's raining, I'll need a sky replacement and on and on.  It’s insane because my house is not for sale and my family isn’t either (at least not today!)  Year after year, our photos are the same except that the kids get a little bigger and we have new matching pjs. We used to document exactly what was going on in our lives with each photo because no one blurred the background or went to crazy lengths to remove the clutter of everyday life.  Looking at those photos and comparing them to my own made me sad. What memory will my kids have when they look back at my fakery? How Mom made them pose for 25 takes in front of the tree for just the right lighting, background and smiles?  In my pursuit of perfection, I have filtered and edited to the point where I’m actually deleting our history.  I don't post family photos on social media so why am I cropping out, covering up and staging them?  Sitting there in that pile of memories I decided to stop manufacturing perfection and start documenting so that decades from now when my kids look back at their photos, they will remember the way things were really and not the Truman Show version.