Why do we take so many photos of the girl?

I have photos of my newborn girl in the hospital, of my girl watching her first bagpiper parade, of my girl dressed as an elf.

I have photos of my girl exposed to a newspaper for the first time, of my girl looking through the window of a cafeteria, of my girl playing with her grandmother, who later died.

I have photos of my girl smiling with a great variety of nuances, of my girl with her cousins ​​from Barcelona, ​​of my girl sticking stickers on the window of the high-speed train.

I have photos of my daughter eating the first slice of an orange and making the face you get when you eat the first slice of an orange, which is the same face you make when you suck on a lemon.

I have thousands of photos of my daughter doing all sorts of things, and that's not counting the hundreds of videos, some audio files, and the pencil portrait an artist friend made of her.

And that is only a year and a half.

We have tried to take them from foreigners, so that she doesn't see that we're focusing on her with our mobile phone (what the hell is that device?), and it's not like we take them off all the time, poor thing, but even so they accumulate day by day and We have so many images of our girl that, when we look at them, classify them, order them, download them and put them in a safe place in a backup copy

I realize that what we have generated is more noise than information.

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There are too many photos of my daughter, so many that some of us no longer know where and why we took them, or what to do with them now.

Sometimes I start to sort through, but it's difficult for me: it's as if we didn't want to lose any of the moments that have been recorded in Candela's life, and that will be lost in the ocean of time and will never return.

It is as if we thought that by keeping photos of all her moments taken from all possible perspectives, we actually had recorded her own life, and we had rebelled against the passage of time.

Basically it is that, the usual thing, the passage of time.

I am naturally chronophobic, so when she was born Candela I wondered how her growth would affect my ferocious fear of clocks.

They told me that with babies time flies by, that "the days went by slowly, but the weeks went by fast", and many other adages from popular wisdom.

Actually, the first stages, Candela's first months, seemed very slow to me, because we were tense and busy, and the girl filled everything with novelty and restlessness, thus making the time thicker.

That gave me a healthy sense of serenity with which to face the arrival of that new being so helpless and beautiful.

However, a time has come when time is recovering its usual vigor, and it operates normally on Candela, who is growing at a faster rate than I would like, who already has around six teeth, mostly incisors and sometimes , a reflective and dreamy look, like an adult.

And then one lives without fully enjoying the present because he is troubled by the future.

I have told Liliana that perhaps it would be convenient to feed Candela a little less or put her in a shoe box at times, to see if that way she doesn't grow so much, and we have fantasized about her crawling, in diapers, to her first day of university , if in the future the University continues to be useful for something.

But all the solutions as the days go by end up being illusory.

It is also true that, although

we feel sorry for Candela to grow, when she actually grows it no longer gives us so much: the Candela that exists now, the Candela that really exists at each moment, is worth it and fascinates us.

Our little girl is transforming little by little and we have deep debates about whether she is already a girl or is still a baby, sometimes it seems one thing to us, other times it seems another.

They say that real grief comes when adolescence arrives and the world of childhood is lost forever.

For now, each stage, each small change and discovery, is an adventure and a satisfaction.

Keep it up, we're getting used to it.

In fact, lately we are taking too few photos of her, for my taste.

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