Sometimes I can feel kind of sad about the fact that my kids have been forced to grow up as city kids.  It's so different from my own childhood -- building forts in the woods, stomping through streams, being free to walk "all the way downtown" (in small-town Midwest America) by myself with little concern for my safety...

I recognize, of course, that there are advantages to growing up in a big city, where something is always happening, where you're close to world-class museums, where you're able to build relationships with people from so many different walks of life.  But there just seems to be something aesthetically lacking, when you're constantly surrounded with concrete and brick and metal and all manner of man-made scenery.  It can feel like a certain element of beauty is missing.

This weekend, though, I felt inspired to go out for a walk with my kids and deliberately seek out the urban grit in our neighborhood.  I took along our camera and tried to capture the beauty of life as a city kid.  The pictures didn't turn out quite as well as I might have liked (I had a bunch of problems with getting the exposure right, given the shifting weather conditions and the significant contrasts in shade and color) -- but I still thought it was a beneficial experiment in finding the unique beauty of our world, and particularly my kids' world.

As usual with this type of post, in case you're interested, you can see more pictures from the weekend's "photo shoot" in the Family Pictures section of the website.