mum, dad and growing up

It seems like this year is going to a big one for my family. Both my brother and I will be married and my parents will also be new grandparents :) However nothing made me realize how much has changed, or rather, how much time is passing by as when I was touching up a bunch of photos for a book today and landed on my parents' portrait.
There's something about being able to zoom into a 12mp image and see every detail, blemish, pore, and wrinkle on someone's face and realize how much a person's face changes as they age. A lot of it is subtle as I can see the same smiles and same expressions in their faces as I did when I was a mere infant. It's the way the texture of their skin has changed, the lines that have appeared from well, laughing a lot these past years, and the way the shape of their faces are different. In all ways they are simply just... older. I have yet to wrap my mind around the idea that I'm in the stage of life that I'm in and my parents are in the stage of life that they're in. Getting married, having kids, your parents retiring -- all of those things seem like such far away events that would never happen but yet here I am in the very middle of it.

It's weird, good and bittersweet all at the same time.

I guess being in the profession that I'm in does this to you once in a while. It really hits you that life is made up of a bunch of fleeting moments. If you're lucky, you'll have some of those moments captured in a collection of photographs so that you can remember them forever.

ch