![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Helen_1980.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nThis is me at age 3.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
My father has always been interested in photography. But back when I was small, his photographing always used to happen in short bursts. So I have several sets of maybe a dozen photos, all clearly taken on the same day, and then sometimes nothing for about a year. Summer was usually productive, when my parents both had vacation and we were all in the countryside at my grandmother’s summer cottage.<\/p>\n
He started scanning his old negatives and slides this summer, and gave me a CD a few months ago. I’ve been going through the photos and tried to sort them by time, and it’s been really hard.<\/p>\n
Some can be placed fairly exactly using other known events. The one where I’m just standing up on my own (but still not looking quite stable) would have been taken in 1978, when I was a year old. If I’m sitting on a blanket and there’s a tiny baby crawling next to me, then it’s definitely 1980, the year my brother was born. My first day at school is also easy to place.
\nOthers just have to be triangulated. Do I look slightly taller there than in those other pictures? Does my face seem slightly older?<\/p>\n
My mother came by this evening, and brought a handful of old black-and-white photos with her. Some of them were pictures I hadn’t seen for years, but had strong memories of: Christmas party at age 3½, myself in a plaid dress, bravely facing Santa Claus… And luckily, most of the prints had dates pencilled in on the reverse, so we could use those to confirm the dates of at least some of the scanned photos.<\/p>\n
Some of the photos were of herself as a child. I had never seen those before.
\nThere was one where she would have been in her late teens, we figured, which would make it about 1970. She was pretty, I thought – with long straight hair and a paisley blouse, and this small serene almost-smile on her face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mother came by this evening, and brought a handful of old black-and-white photos with her. Some of them were pictures I hadn’t seen for years, but had strong memories of: Christmas party at age 3½, myself in a plaid dress, bravely facing Santa Claus…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything_else"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18256,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/18256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}