Lately I’m fascinated by how my girls are imitating us. Anna has always copied our speech patterns and many of our behaviors that you would expect, but some things are striking when you see them mirrored by a child.

I bought Anna a digital camera for her fourth birthday; as far as she knows, all “real” cameras are digital. She gets her camera out every now and then and takes a picture, and there’s nothing particularly notable about her use of it. However, when she was around my “studio equipment” recently, she wanted to take pictures of me with my SLR and strobes, having me pose with different props, making different expressions, and doing the sort of “active” photography that I do when I’m taking set portraits. I found it really unusual–I think it’s a good thing, but for some reason it felt sort of weird too.

Anna has lately been more interested in cooking, which I think will suit her well. She’s a very conscientious kid, so she’ll probably be using the microwave and stove (supervised of course) before too long. Tara, on the other hand, we could probably rent out to a product safety testing lab; you can watch her for any length of time and see that there’s some “MacGyver meets Dennis the Menace” sort of hijinks in her future.