Football and a Pink Camera

Football

These boys have gone crazy for football. James got one out of the prize box at the doctor’s office and immediately began acting out full seasons of Eagles’ football in the backyard, complete with preseason, postseason, scores, and rankings for all the other teams in the league.

Owen waited for months for Grandma Davis to bring back the football he left in Pennsylvania. Felix basically watched the older two until they were foolish enough to leave a football lying around, and then would snatch it up (“MY football”) and hold it until a parent separated the ensuing scuffle of crying little boys.

Felix got his own football a few days ago, and then traded it to Owen for the Bills football. A day later they traded back, and now Felix has the new football again. For awhile he was in possession of a falling-apart nerf football, but that one didn’t look enough like James and Owen’s. His new one is a legitimate ball.

I play catch with them in the backyard. They complain when I throw it too hard, but also when I don’t throw it hard enough. They tell me every time a throw is too high or too low, and Owen cries whenever someone else makes a catch and he doesn’t. They like to throw all three balls at me at the same time, and then they get upset if I don’t catch all three. It’s a very good workout.

They’re all getting a good workout too. They can play in the backyard unsupervised, and they’ll stay out for as long as we let them. They run in circles whooping and celebrating and making diving catches, and by the time they come in they’re drenched in sweat and covered in grass stains. They have not smelled very good this week.

The Pink Camera

Back in ancient times, before cameras came standard on smart phones, you had to have a camera that was its own device. I gave J a pink digital camera as a birthday present one summer when we were dating, and she used it to take pictures of her life at RWC and occasionally send me photos while I was living in Chicago.

Then we all got smartphones, and the camera was retired to half-unpacked moving boxes full of half-broken laptop parts and old pens. This year we unearthed that box and found the camera inside. It still worked, and we even found some memories (the stub of our admission ticket to the Butterfly Conservatory) inside the case.

We decided that it could be the boy’s camera. They ran the first set of batteries down within a day. Our first attempt to make a slideshow of their work didn’t pan out, but the next day we looked at their first attempts at photography.

Of the nearly 500 pictures that they took, at least 50 were of the FatHead Eagles logo that James has above his bed. There were also individual shots of each of their football helmet collections, and then shots of a toy Yoshi action figure wearing each of the football helmets. Owen took pictures of James running around in the backyard playing football, and then apparently took a number of photos of the inside of his own mouth.

James used the camera to take blurry shots of his favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips, and pictures (for some reason) of his favorite stuffed animals at incredibly close range. He found these pictures hilarious. 

There are a number of pictures of the clouds, the grass, the garden, and my car. I don’t know when they got it, but they apparently snuck up behind me and took a picture of my butt. Also, there about 30 pictures of a book on the New York Jets that they checked out of the library.

I remember when I got my first camera, and I think I used it in about the same way. Thanks to Dad for all the work that must have gone into actually developing silly five-year-old with a camera photos in a darkroom. It was much easier to just pull out the SD card and put it in a laptop.