This picture is from the first time Roby really went swimming, she went swimming this afternoon, and I don’t think she enjoyed it quite as much. She did like parts of it; she liked when Archie swam up to her, all splashes, she liked when I went under the water and came back up, she liked when I spun her around and dunked her toes, she like when mom came in the water and people shouted her name with smiles in their voices. She did not like being dunked all that much. We only did it the once, but even getting too cloes was a bit much. She drank a lot of pond water, and as she went down for a nap she burped a lot.

I don’t have any photos of the swimming, but I do have a few gigs of video. It’s a small fraction of what we did together, but that’s because I was more focused on the swimming than the documenting, which is a good thing, I reckon. 

The balance between proudly documenting a good moment and being present for it is something I’ve nailed when it comes to photography. More than being entirely present, photographing people I love can bring me closer to them, it can help me appreciate them and what they’re doing more fully. I look from different angles, I look more actively. It quiets a certain autistic part of my brain to have something more to do, something creative. 

Recording video is something I’ve been doing for less than a week. I say recording rather than making, the way I refer to photography, because I have yet to do the editing bit, which seems just as critical, if not more so, than the recording bit. Maybe I’ll hate it and I’ll go back to taking pictures. 

Or maybe this blog will stop being a Blog and start being a Vlog. I’ve threatened to change the format enough, I think.