I Want to Take a Picture of Confidence

I take a lot of pictures of C (duh!) - I'm guessing the cyber-world has a gigantic stadium piled high with digital pictures of adorable babies.  How did our parents even  pick just the few to fit in the albums?! One thing I can't preserver (mush starts HERE) and wish with everything in me that I could, is how much this little girl loves herself.  We walk by a wall that has an engagement picture of Mr. and I looking childless and rested under which there are baby pictures of Mr., myself, and C.  She gets this look on her face and it is obvious that she is just enamored with the baby she sees in her picture - even more than the two other babies, so it's not just a "baby" thing.  When we're getting ready for bath time, she checks herself out in the mirror and she's thrilled to see that baby again.  She smiles when the baby smiles, looks the baby up and down and looks genuinely impressed with everything about that person in the mirror (more so than the same old mommy or daddy in the mirror).  She pats her tummy with pride often throughout the day.  She loves the look and movement and taste of her hands and feet.  She feels completely free (and totally unedited) to express herself.  She isn't embarrassed to be the loudest one in the room.
More likely than not, this unconditional self-love will be gone before she even has a memory of it and that totally breaks my heart in a million different pieces.
When I found out I was having a girl I was a little stunned - mostly because I recall myself, and how difficult I was from age 12 through...well, I'll let you know when it goes away.  At first I thought how difficult it was for my parents...emotions that couldn't be named or explained, but were nonetheless spilling out of me. An unpredictable swinging pendulum that could take out a grown man in the blink of an eye.  And a sudden awareness - nay, INSISTENCE -  of everything real and imagined that was wrong with me, my looks in particular.  But now that she's here and I want perfection for her life, I remember how much it royally sucked for me too.  By junior high I could stare into a mirror and criticize what I saw endlessly - in high school, it got worse despite the fact that photographic evidence proves quite the contrary.  AND it's STILL going...it's really a big cluster &%$# because crazy hormones when you're young add to it, but then aging adds to it, then pregnancy and crazy body changes, and finally menopause.  As a friend of mine once said, "as men age, they start looking more like Sean Connery, but as women age they start to look more like...Sean Connery."  He's an ass.  But he's not totally wrong.  Despite this fact, I want to break this cycle...
As I had one of my not-rare-enough, exhaustion and guilt fueled, mini breakdowns the other evening (probably a Wednesday - those suck) I blabbered to wide-eyed mister, "I'm not saying this so that you'll try to make me feel better like 'one of THOSE girls' but sometimes I really feel like I suck at everything and am so uuuuugggggllllyyy <sniff, sniff>"  To which he responded, "'so should I not tell you that you aren't or...."  I then calmed down and explained that I need to change ME (as in my thought patterns, not plastic surgery).  If not FOR me, then for C - because neither of us want to find out in 12 years that she has posted her picture on the world wide web asking total pervy strangers if she "Hot or Not."

Totally Confident Katie

Not-so-confident Katie

So this is going to be my way of trying to preserve C's self-love...being a good example (balls! that always takes work!)