Camera shy
I'm never going to make money off cute animal videos if my cat doesn't start cooperating
My husband and I enjoy watching funny videos of dogs and cats. Please don’t judge. It’s a hard world out there right now.
We ourselves have a cat that does funny things. We just can’t manage to capture them on film.
The cat has an uncanny sense of when I am trying to take a photo or video of her, and she immediately stops doing whatever cute, funny thing she is doing.
Oh look, she’s crawled inside an empty cardboard box and is popping her head in and out of it like it’s a whack-a-mole game! Let me get my phone out! That is the moment when the cat decides to stay in the box.
Oh look, she’s lying on the floor gazing out the window. She looks so regal! Let me take her picture! This is the moment the cat decides to sit up and start grooming her nether regions.
Oh, look, the cat is climbing up the screen door! Should I grab the cat before she destroys the screen door? Of course not, I’m gonna try and get a funny video! This is the moment when the cat jumps down and wanders off to do something boring.
When my kids were little, they had the same aversion to photos.
I used to try and get a photo of the two kids every month, which I then used to make wall calendars for the grandparents.
The holiday photos were the hardest to take. It wasn’t enough that I required them to get dressed up. I was also asking them to stand still?! The indignity.
Their favorite trick during holiday photo shoots was to stare down at the floor while I tried to take a photo. “Look up!” I’d tell them. They dutifully looked up — all the way up to the ceiling. If I then said, “Ha ha, very funny, look down please.” … You can see where this was going.
One time they outsmarted themselves. They were looking down so hard they were bent all the way over, and when I asked them to look up, they came up so fast they collided and head-butted each other.
I didn’t get a photo of that because I was laughing too hard.
Bad mom, I know.
Every fall, we dutifully gathered on the front porch so I could take a first-day-of-school photo. Around middle school, though, the kids stopped smiling.
But then, social media changed all of that. Their friends started taking photos of them, and posting those photos online, and all of a sudden my kids became photogenic.
They could tell without looking if someone had pulled out a phone to take a photo of them, and they would turn and smile sunnily at the camera (or duck out of range). It was like they had evolved a new survival instinct to avoid looking bad on Instagram.
Of course, I still have outtake photos of them in their younger days, glaring and smirking and making goofy faces at the camera. I am keeping these for blackmail purposes.
Bad mom, I know.