Those mundane home movies of yours are immensely valuable

Like most families, we have gigs and gigs of digital videos of our kids as they were growing up.

While home movie cameras have been around for more than half a century, the digital era has made it exponentially easier to chronicle your family history and share it with everyone (whether they're interested or not).

Lately, having watched some of our videos from the chaotic mid- and late 90s, I've come to realize the importance of these personal archives.

I had forgotten, for instance, just how crazy those days were for us. Logic suggests having four (and later five) little kids in the same house is inevitably going to generate some degree of mayhem, but it had slipped my mind just how fun and crazy it all was.

The short clip above is a scene from our family Christmas 1998, and a quieter account a week later of little Jared eating baby cereal for the first time.

Nothing earth-shattering, yet there is so much to enjoy in those two minutes:

• The tumult of voices that punctuated every family Christmas
• A shot of my mother-in-law and father-in-law, now both gone, as their granddaughters Courtney and Elissa present Grandpa with a gift (a weather rock, as it turns out)
• Hairstyles I had forgotten about, and a long-since-faded hair color (dark brown) for me
• Jared's little Cleveland Lumberjacks hockey bib
• Jared's less-than-enthusiastic reaction to his first taste of something that wasn't breast milk (I believe the cereal was mixed with breast milk, but after a few spoonfuls, it didn't seem to help)
• Scenes from our old house on East 300th Street

As I said, none of this is life-changing or especially significant to anyone but us. Yet I can't get over how wonderful it all is.

As time goes on and your children inevitably grow up and move on, you forget the small moments that made up the fabric of life. The big events are great, of course, but your existence is mostly the everyday stuff, the memory of which brings back feelings you forgot you ever had.

Thank God for digital video.