The Priceless Gift of Losing my Camera

After work Wednesday Nick "gave me" one of my Mother's Day gifts early...a membership to Ashley Ann's Snap Shop workshops...where she teaches you how to take totally awesome pictures. 

I was so excited!  I mean, I have wanted a membership to Snap Shop for, well, forever!  and it was so thoughtful of him to think of me. 

I quickly started going through the classes.  This was going to be the best thing ever!  The very first thing she showed was neat buttons and bells and whistles on her camera. 

"I wonder if our camera has that button?" I asked Nick. 

And that's when the trouble started. 

We quickly realized that our camera had, poof, disappeared into thin air. 

It was gone. 

I was having heart palpitations.  I felt like I was going to throw up.  I was dreading the thoughts going through my head...it's really gone. 

I felt like such an idiot.  I should have had an eagle eye on the thing.  Who loses a dslr camera?  Ugh. 

We looked and looked and looked.  Nick went to businesses, churches, everywhere looking for it.  He took the third row out of our vehicle to try to hunt it down.  We called grocery stores, grandparents, and restaurants.  But to no avail. 

That night we didn't sleep well.  In the morning we both commiserated on how it feels like it's going to just appear.  How it should be around.  What on earth could have happened to it? 

Well, Thursday morning.  I found it. 

I woke Emma up for school and like all good fairy tale stories start, I was yelling at Emma. 

Does anyone else's children have a million backpacks that they hang up with stuff still in them?  I was going through a bag she had taken to play practice daily (the play has been practiced, performed, and we're done with it by the way) and there in the bag sat at least one outfit of hers, a water bottle, on and on.  I reached for her bag she takes to Awana's and that's when I felt the familiar weight and cylinder of the big lense. 

It had been found. 

This is a fairly boring story, I realize, except to say that there's nothing like losing something to make you realize how much you love something.  Aside from Easter and the Awana ceremony where the camera had been put in said bag, I hadn't used that camera for probably a good six months. 

Oh sure, I would snap a few "hey it's your birthday" shots but nothing in terms of capturing the every day.  Nothing to try to catch the glint in my kids' eyes when they are reading with Daddy.  Or the furrowed brow when they are building with legos. 

I had lost the desire to capture the every day.  It had become mundane to me.  There was no more magic in the daily. 

Or so I thought.  This morning I used the camera for the first time in months.  It felt like a raw and opened part of me was exposed again. 

And I kind of liked it. 

Seeing your life through the eye of a lens makes you see things you don't otherwise notice.  The way natural lights makes everything look amazing. 

How fun breakfast can be when you're poring over a random catalog of fireworks that came to your house (did they know we have a boy living here???). 

And how beautiful the view is out my window as I write this blog this afternoon. 

I am so thankful I found my camera.  Not only because, hello?, it was so super expensive, but because it has given me a new perspective to start seeing life through the lens again. 

And that is something that is priceless.