Candid.

For every picture of Ava I capture, there are two photo ops and a sitting I've passed up.

Even if I go an entire day without recording our daughter's every burp, smile & bowel movement, I'm confident that we're still squirreling back enough memories for the ages.  I mean, for cryin' out loud, we've unwittingly trained this seven and a half month old child to pause and focus when she finds herself before a camera, iPad or smart phone.  I've often wondered if the cover of Mommy's iPad has the dumbfounding impression of a Death Star hovering above her crib, its black leather cover blotting out the sun.  (And that, my fellow Trekkies, was a Star Wars reference.  You're welcome, Misty.)

It's not that I'm disenchanted with the miracles of everyday life or the lovely family I share it with.  Sometimes I'm positively overwhelmed by the beauty of it.  I just think that some memories are even more precious when they're tucked away into a private album in my mind, uninterrupted by entreaties to Look This Way!  and Smile, Show Teeth!  

Now that I'm grown up, I appreciate that my dad was the king of the candid shot.  In the family pictures of my childhood, we rarely ever assumed a practiced pose.  He just went about the business of snapping away, spontaneously capturing mom's interest in me and my siblings, or the discomfort of three sunburned kids at a theme park, or the glee of a bathing baby in mid-splash, or Grandma with a Solo cup full of caffeine-free Diet Coke en route to her mouth.  Within these actions dwell the details of our lives, the minutiae we would miss if we were parted from one another.  These are the precious things that the arranged Olan Mills portrait cannot reveal.

I want to remember the messy, spontaneous stuff that might not please anyone but me.  Our newborn baby still slathered in birth goop.

  Her tiny round face with a tube snaking from her nose, her face screwed up in her determination to nap in the noisy NICU.  

Ava's first screaming fit in her carseat (which I secretly thought was incredibly adorable). 

 Her victory fist phase.  

Her Gene Simmons phase.  

Her disoriented expression when she woke up in a Lowe's shopping cart.  

Her couch sleeps with her Daddy, all spread across his chest like a flying spider monkey who's body-checked a tree.

I truthfully don't give a flying flip if I ever own a flawless picture of our family. I'm not interested in convincing our descendants twenty or fifty years from now that we were perfect people with Colgate smiles and no awkwardness or difficulty.  I want them -- and you - to know that every faltering, exhilarating step of parenting our daughter with Down Syndrome has been satisfying in ways that will never be apparent to onlookers.  That the sweetness of our days together is strikingly offset by the contrast of the dark undereye circles we've earned over the course of sleepless nights.  That there has been uncertainty and near disaster and inappropriate silliness, even in moments of despair.  That our baby girl reserves the right to wear a bow like a crown, even in a hospital bed or on a quick trip to Walmart.

We celebrate the unscripted.

We frame the mundane.

And my favorite pictures are the ones you'll never see.