Long-lost Video Files

This is a Canon PowerShot S30, circa 2002.  It was our first digital camera and it has literally been all over the world.  The sand from some far-flung beach still jams the lens cover door, as it has for years now.  It was replaced as our main camera four and a half years ago, right before Gideon came along - some of the first shots taken with the new Canon EOS were third trimester belly shots.

But we keep the PowerShot because it does one thing our EOS does not - it can take 30-second videos.   We've never been video people - no wedding video, no labor and delivery room video (are you kidding me?), no hours of our child playing quietly by himself - but we have found that the ability to catch 30 seconds or so of live action for posterity can come in quite handy.

However, since we use it so rarely and so sporadically, the videos sit on the camera, stored away in the camera bag, for years sometimes before they get downloaded.  When Gideon was almost two years old, we discovered a couple of short videos taken when he was barely two weeks old.  Watching them left us speechless and in awe.

I dusted off the PowerShot yesterday to capture a little of Gideon's first series of "real" swim lessons, as we near the end of the two weeks (more on that later).  When I downloaded the videos this morning, I found videos from our last days and months in Fort Worth - a couple of them even shot our very last morning in the house - the sound of kids' laughter echoing through the empty rooms as we forestall the inevitability of saying goodbye.