You are only this age one time in your life. You’re gorgeous, you’re courageous, you’re going through one of the biggest transitions of your life. This is the perfect time to capture this moment on camera, so you can look back on yourself in later years and be reminded of who you were.

I have my older sister Elaine to thank for having scanned these photos of my parents. Probably forgotten in a musty photo album or buried in a shoebox, they would have gone unnoticed, had she not made that effort.

We lost our lovely mother in 2009, and six years before that we lost our father.