I've recently become smitten with the Awkward Family Photos blog. The site is heavy on the nostalgia. Each new photograph carries with it reminders of the moments you want to remember and maybe even some you'd rather forget. 

There are pictures of families dressed in matching outfits, superimposed on exotic backgrounds, overly close and laughably strained, miserable, happy, surprised, accompanied by equally awkward pets, peering out from behind pillars and beehive hairdos, with animals copulating in the background, and in a number of scenarios that I'm not even sure how to put into words.

I'm telling you that if you spend enough time looking, you will find the people you grew up with, or at least a group that emits the same frequencies of strangeness. We may not all be able to identify with the idealized family, but I guarantee you that this collection of familiar oddities will remind you of your own crazy clan in some way. 

Looking through these pictures brought everything back to me--the different stages that any collection of related people living together inevitably pass through; and, most of all, memories of childhood. It's all there, the quibbles, the compulsory milk at meals, the too-tightly braided hair, the tender and graceless act of growing up. As a token of my gratitude to this wonderful blog for making me remember, I offer you my own awkward family photo.

This picture of my father and me documents a particular time in both of our lives in which he looked rather well while I insisted on wearing that shirt and my Greek Fisherman cap at all times, and was pretty much incapable of having a photo taken without crossing my eyes. Yet, caps and crossed eyes aside, it's also pretty sweet. Oh, family.

Do you have any funny family memories to share?