Top ten. Scratch that. Top twelve.

It’s no secret that I have a lot of pictures of my child. Like, a ton. I don’t have a great camera and I’m not a very good photographer at all (okay – I’m horrible) but that doesn’t stop me from attempting to document every.single.moment of this kid’s life.

Now that we’ve entered the digital age, taking millions lots of pictures is easy. You don’t have to worry about using up your film, the cost of developing and the space that it will take to store your seventy billion photo albums. But because of that, we often end up with oodles and oodles of photos that can easily get jumbled and lost in digital storage. In an attempt to avoid having these photos just sit on my hard drive for years and years and years, I’ve put my favourite photos in a separate folder at the end of each month – a folder that will eventually be turned into a photobook at the end of her first year.

I look through these photos a lot. I was looking through them today and realized that some of them are incredibly special to me. Of course, I love them all – but there are definitely those few that I hold closest to my heart.

Somehow, I managed to narrow it down to my top 10 12 (I tried but I couldn’t weed out those last two) favourite photos of Eva to date (but, um, to be honest, my verrrrry favourite one isn’t included because its, you know, not suitable for public viewing. Let’s just say, it was taken when she was quite fresh. As in, not even fully into the world). Most of them weren’t even taken by me but by my brother. These are the photos that put a smile on my face no matter how many times I look at them.

So, here they are, in no particular order. My top twelve.

1. My first moments as a mother. I simultaneously love and hate this photo. I’m sure I don’ have to explain why.

2. Eva and I at 2 weeks old in the garden – taken by my brother.

3. Our Christmas card photo – totally sums up her personality – again, taken by my brozo.

4. Chillin’ with the Big Dude. Her face cracks me up every.single.time I see this photo. She’s all, “Um, yeah I am”.

5. Eva and her Daddy at Christmas. Melt. Me. (Taken by brother)

6. Eva and Nana. Cannot tell you how much I cherish this photo. The joy? Unstoppable. (Please note that the shirt Eva is wearing says, “Grandma Makes Me Happy”. Yeah, she does). (Taken by brother).

7. Baby wearing love.

8. Elvis’ love child.

9. Kissin’ Cousins.

10. (okay, and 11 and 12). Those eyes? Kill me. (Left and bottom right: taken by brother).

She is a beauty to me. I easily could have dubbed this post, “Top 100”. Consider yourselves lucky.