My favorite photo of myself is more than 40 years old. I'm a toddler, all chubby jowls and saucer eyes. My big sister is hugging me on her lap. We're grinning into the camera as a sandy wind whips our hair.

Somehow, through four kids and moves to three different countries, our parents hung onto that beach-vacation photo.

For me it's a snapshot that unlocks childhood memories. Of that Pacific Northwest beach where summer after summer we played in the tidepools, caught crabs, roasted marshmallows over a driftwood fire. Simple days of simply being together.

That old photo has inspired me to rummage through a drawer in my musty basement that's stuffed with years of photos of my own family - husband, daughter, stepdaughters.

Most of the photos are from trips. Like most families, it's on vacation that we have those Kodak moments - those times and places that we want to capture on film.

But, like many families, the photos end up tucked away and forgotten.

My big sister, though, found a way to keep her family's memories fresh. She started a photo album for each of her three boys when they were babies, faithfully adding through the years pictures of trips, friends and family reunions.

The boys are young men now, leaving home for jobs and marriage. But they're taking their albums, a record of their lives and travels, with them.

I've long admired my sister's organization. But it took my 6-year-old daughter to spur me to action, to get me to do some serious sorting of our travel snapshots.

Getting the picture

My daughter had clamored so much to use my camera that on our last trip I bought her one of those cardboard one-time-use cameras. I'd rather have her bang up that than my costly Nikon.

She proudly blazed away during our whale-watching boat trip around the San Juan Islands. She took pictures of everything that moved - on the boat and in the water.

She doesn't care that the orcas' fins, hundreds of feet away from the boat, look like specks of dirt in her photographs. She knows what they are. She doesn't care that the boat's railing, right at her eye level, intrudes upon most of her pictures. She can see beyond it.

And, unlike me, she wasn't going to tuck her photos away in a drawer. As soon as the pictures came back from the developer, she pounced upon the little mini-album that came with them and immediately inserted her favorite photos into the plastic sleeves.

Her album now sits on the living-room coffee table, and she proudly shows it to any visiting kid or grownup who will look at it.

She's shown me how to take charge of photographic memories. Now, if I can only get her to organize all the rocks and shells and brochures she brings home from trips . . .

Kristin Jackson's "Kidding Around" is published on the first Sunday of each month.