Ten Year Challenge...Or Not.

#TenYearChallenge ...... Or Not.

(Continuing the “trying to appreciate memes” series)

The 10 Year Challenge is perhaps not one of my kids’ favorites within the meme topic, but we did have some conversation about what could we do for our version.

To be clear, this is not an “our” version. This is the embarrassing, “I have a weird mom” version.

The #10yearchallenge topic did prompt me to look back through my early 2009 photos. And I can’t actually believe that we all survived life with me as the caretaker of two little kids (there’s that super cute photo where the four year old is bashing the wall with homemade nunchucks, while simultaneously the baby is trying to throw himself off the bed headfirst....and....I was taking a picture?)

I also notice that the kids for the most part look so strangely happy. They are smiling unselfconsciously at the camera as often as not. And clearly, I was willing to take their picture when they were damaging property, trying to take a header off a high place, or just plain hysterical. 

I might have clearer memories of the straight 10 1/2 hours of screaming...or the afternoons of the repeated mantra: “Mommy I will poke you with a sharp stick!” 

But they appear sort of happy, those little kids.

Now that they are adolescents...the camera rarely captures unselfconscious joy. 

I can’t help but share the suspicion that the whole 10 year thing is a massive data mining for face recognition and age progression algorithms. And I generally try to avoid posting my kids’ faces now that they are older...

So the lack of adolescent full frontal happy face is perhaps fortuitous.

I considered drawing a joyful two year old beside a withdrawn twelve year old in standard 10 Year Challenge format, but in the end that was just too boring.

Here we have the angsty and hoodie-obscured elder toting the former happy toddler’s head in place of his heavy school satchel (the toddler face is surely beyond face recognition software’s domain of interest anyway)

As always, my apologies to all involved. 

But hey, you were a super cute kid (still are, but don’t believe me)