Time in a bottle?

As I have continued to rummage through my photos, I stumble across some gems that have special meaning to someone or I just like.  This photos happens to be one of them.  These two shots are the two favorite shots I have of all three of my kids when they were young.  

I took the first shot of them at Cedar Breaks National Monument back in 2001.  Obviously, the composition needs work, but I don't really care about that. This shot represents the last time that all of the kids went camping with me.  My daughter decided after this camping trip that it wasn't for her and my older son followed suit four years later.  Only the youngest still camps regularly with me.

This upcoming summer, it looks like all of them are going to go camping with me again.  I'm really looking forward to this and yet, at the same time, haven't planned anything out.  Back then, things were planned out pretty much to the minute so they wouldn't get bored.  Now, we'll just enjoy the hikes, get some geocaching in and just enjoy each other's company for about a week in a variety of spots in California.

The second shot was taken in 2000 when we camped in Yosemite National Park.  I took this shot after we had finished hiking all the way up to the top of Vernal Falls and back down again.  You can see they were tired.  The youngest wasn't quite five in this shot and he walked the entire way up the Mist Trail to the precipice of the waterfall, 3 miles round trip.

As I look at these two shots, I realize that these photos were taken during their age of innocence.  A lot has changed in the last 12 years.  My daughter was just hired by a school district up in Milpitas, California and will be embarking on her own teaching career, starting with a 4th grade classroom in the fall.  

My older son graduates from University of California Santa Cruz, but will not go through the ceremony.  I believe it actually happened last week.  He didn't go to the ceremony, because he's studying abroad in England right now.  He comes home this Saturday.  I'm looking forward to seeing him again.  I suppose he'll be spending most of the summer with us while he looks for a job.  Eventually, I expect him to move out on his own as well, much like his sister has already done.

My youngest will graduate from high school this upcoming Thursday.  He's on the brink of adulthood and will be studying Physics at UC Riverside in the fall.  He'll be living in the dorms there, so essentially, we'll be "empty nesters" although he's not fully gone yet.  All three of them are getting ready or have already started to create their own lives away from my wife and my life.  That's the way things work in this world.

You can't save time in a bottle, but the memories live on in these images.