This was our Christmas picture. I think I took about 40 pictures I just kept on saying, "Annika" and everyone else had orders to just keep looking at me and smiling. Rachel said her jaw was so sore that evening that she wasn't sure if she could go to chorus practice!

The biggest mistake I made (as a parent) is the one that most of us make... I did not live in the moment enough. This is particulary clear now that the moment is gone, capurted only in the photograph. There is one pictureof (our three children) sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swingset on a summer day, ages six, four, and one. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been is such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
Anne Quindlen