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This is a guest post by new dad Sam Davidson. He’s figuring out what’s next in life while taking lots of pictures.

Baby pictures – if you have the right photographer, camera, or baby – can be great. They’re priceless memories preserved on film or a computer for relatives and friends to coo and comment on. Of course, if you have an ugly baby or a crappy camera, no one will ever want to see any representation of your child ever again.

Yet, even ugly babies deserve to have their picture taken. I’m not sure what primal nurturing force within us looks at a picture of a young boy or girl and immediately feels empathy, pride, motivation, and warmth. Whatever it is, it hit me full force this week.

My wife and I take lots of pictures of our daughter. Here’s one of her in a giant hat:

Any occasion is a chance to take a picture. Her first stroller ride? Take 400 pictures. The second time she sat up? Spend 30 minutes clicking away. Spit up on the cat? Take multiple pictures of her and the cat. We’re still not sure we’re up for having another child, but I’ve heard from everyone that subsequent children get fewer pictures taken of them by a factor of infinity. My family is living proof. There’s a picture of me for everything from my first steps to my first baseball game. My younger sisters don’t show up on film until they graduated high school.

Here’s my daughter in the bathtub:

Anyway, a real (professional) photographer came over this week to take some family pictures. I did my best to dress in khaki and white and we all did our best to get our daughter to look at the camera. I can’t wait to flip through several dozen pictures of my daughter not smiling with her head tilted slightly to the side trying to figure out why Daddy is waving his hands like a loon and Mommy is making weird noises.

The things we do for memories. One such person is Adele Enerson who reached Internet stardom this week with pictures of her baby Mila in various states of dreaming. Move over, Anne Geddes.

For all the pictures we take, the best part is sharing them. We love to look at images of our daughter in various states of ordinary activity, but so do others. And this validates all of the shutter clicks. When I send pictures to my grandfather, I know it was worth all 97 shots of her in that same dress. His pride and elation speak 1,000 words, which seems a fair price for any picture.

Sam Davidson is officially a grown up. He blogs here.

Like a lot of 20-somethings, I have a fair amount of friends trying to make it as financial advisers, insurance salespersons, and photographers. That third classification isn’t related to the other two, but I seem to know a lot of college friends who think they’re Annie Leibovitz just because they got a fancy camera for Christmas a few years back.

Anyway, nearly all of these friends in the financial world have tried to hit me up to buy insurance or pay them to buy mutual funds for me. I politely let them take me out to lunch and then decline the offer of extra coverage. It’ like grabbing tacos with Hertz.

Until my daughter showed up. Once I became a parent, my outlook changed and I realized that if I were to get hit by a bus – . Nix that. That’s the scenario every one of these guys uses. “If you get hit by a bus tomorrow…” Where the heck do these guys think I go jogging? Onramps? At the depot downtown? Look, if I get hit by a bus, you need to start asking some hard questions like who stole my car and why I suddenly lost the ability to look both ways. Let’s rephrase.

Once I became a parent, my outlook changed and I realized that if I were at the zoo one day and a rabid emu escaped his pen and pecked me to death that I’d want my wife and daughter to be able to pay for the things I earned money to pay for (as well as establish the Sam Davidson Memorial Fund for Emu Attack Victims). I also realized we’d need a will.

A will is one of those things that most people don’t have until it’s too late to get one. Kind of like a laserdisc player or a prom date. I called a young lawyer friend of mine and we got one set up this week.

It was painless. It’s basically an expensive sheet or paper that says if my wife and I die in some sort of checkers fiasco, our daughter will go to people we choose instead of someone who thinks Lord of the Rings is real. Such prevention is priceless.

So here I am, all grown up. I say that not just because I’m a dad (most men are able to do this around age 14). I say it because I have a fancy sheet of paper describing who gets what when I bow out of this life in an untimely fashion. Thankfully very few people meet their maker while watching reruns of Friends or Weeds, which is how I spend 75% of my free time. So I’ll knock on wood that I’ll be around for a while and I won’t choke on all the Kashi granola I buy from Alice and eat each morning for breakfast.

I can’t wait to do more grown up things like renovate a house, worry about Halloween candy, or go to the doctor regularly. I’ll be sure to update you on each one.

On Fridays, Sam Davidson blogs about being a new dad. The other days, he’s working on his next book.

We finally did it. We finally went to a movie as parents. It took us nearly six months, but we finally went out – just the two of us.

It wasn’t a date, mind you, because we went at 2:15 in the afternoon. While this may be dating to some of you over the age of 75, and while we do enjoy a 9 PM bedtime most nights, we’ll simply call it a nice afternoon out.

My mom had agreed to watch the baby so we could do some shopping, grab some lunch, and take in a movie. We were really hoping Toy Story 3 wouldn’t be sold out by the time we showed up to get tickets. Otherwise we would have had to watch Eclipse and let’s face it – there are lots of other things I’d rather watch than angst-ridden teen vampires talk about love. Like infomercials. Or this.

We got our tickets and found our seats, feeling like something was missing the whole time. One of my greatest fears as a parent is that I’ll leave my child somewhere; not when she’s older and I forget to pick her up from school, but rather like any day now, while she’s tiny. I’ll take her shopping (for stuff I can’t get on Alice) and check out and put the groceries in my car and leave her in the buggy. I’ll get halfway home and realize she’s still in the cart. I did this with a case of beer once and ran every traffic light until I got back to the parking lot. Luckily, the drinks were still safely tucked on the bottom part of the cart.

Anyway, we made it through the funniest Toy Story installment yet and left with a few conclusions:

• The first movie came out when I was in high school. No movie franchise will be able to produce hits 15 years apart ever again. Not Indiana Jones. Definitely not Twilight. Okay, maybe The Hangover will come close.
• It will be a blast to take our daughter to a movie when she’s older.
• Toy Story pulls at none of my heartstrings (I don’t have that many to begin with) because I had no emotional attachment to my toys as a child.

Sure, there were toys I liked and enjoyed playing with. But I didn’t have anything I had to sleep beside or had to take to school with me. Maybe it was because most of my toys were boring. I don’t mean like my parents gave me a stick to play with; rather nothing had a pull-string like Woody or lights and sounds like Buzz. Maybe it was because I could fall asleep just fine each night without a plastic or plush animal nearby. Whatever it is, when it was time to go to college, childhood toys weren’t even close to making the cut.

My daughter already has a million toys. The latest ridiculous toy someone gave us is a toy cell phone. Whenever we get a gift like that, my mouth says “Thank you” but my head starts thinking, “How much can I get for this at consignment if I leave it in the packaging?” Right now, she has very little emotional attachment to any toy. Today, in fact, she chewed on an instant oatmeal wrapper for 30 minutes.

Undoubtedly, however, she’ll become attached to something and it’ll be the only thing we can’t find when we’re already 45 minutes late to catch a flight. It will be at that point when I thank my parents for giving me crappy toys as a kid, even if it means I don’t really care that much about the latest cartoon movie (and that I’ll never care about vampire movies).

Unless my daughter does, of course. Then I’ll be in the front row with her.

Team Edward, BTW.