Baby Pictures

Over the past few days I have been working at putting all of the pictures from Andy's first year onto a disk. I thought this was going to be pretty easy. Of course, I was wrong.

When I sat down to do this on Saturday night, I realized that I couldn't find 90% of his one year pictures on my desk top! I thought that maybe they were actually on Matt's lap top since mine stopped working last year and it took me a good three months to take it to get fixed. However, when I checked his computer, they weren't there either.

Then, it all started coming back to me.... I actually started this project sometime in the fall. I remember putting the pictures on a disk, but not finishing it. The disk never got labeled and Lord only knows what has happened to it since! The kicker?... I was doing it to help clean up my desktop, so I deleted all of those pictures after I put them on the disk! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

My solution? I remembered that I have e-mailed pretty much every picture worth putting in an album to my Mom. So, I went into my sent mail box in gmail and searched for everything I had sent to my Mom from August 2008 - August 2009 (which was... ummm...hundreds!) Then I looked for every e-mail with an attachment and re-copied all of the pictures I had sent her back to my desk top. This took a little over two hours.

Tonight I copied them all onto a disk labeled in HUGE letters with a INDUSTRIAL Super Permanent Ink Sharpie from my husband's work bench. Now, I just need to figure out what to do with them all! I'm going to be realistic here and say that there is NO WAY I am going to get a one year scrapbook done. That is not a precedent I want to set! I just got our wedding album put together for goodness sake!... Four and a half years late!... Plus, my future siste-in-law (boy it will sure be nice when I can just start saying SISTER-IN-LAW! Although I guess this is better than what I used to say when I would talk about her which was "my friend Jaime who is also dating my brother." We were friends for seven or eight years before she started dating Jeff, so I didn't want to short change our friendship by just calling her "my brother's girlfriend")... anyway... I digress... Jaime made me a scrapbook that is already put together and just waiting for pictures, so I do have that! Yaye! And I'll pick some pictures out and put that together next month. But what to do with all the other pictures? I think that since I have so many photo pages left over from the wedding album, I'll just buy an album to start putting all of Andy's photos in and maybe divide it by year. I do like the look of those bound books that you can order with the pictures printed right on the pages, but they are too pricey for our budget right now. If I could find a good deal on them (which I do see from time to time) then maybe I'll do one of those instead.

Maybe I need to Google photo archiving and see what kind of systems people use! Sigh... that's a task for another month! For now, I'm just glad to have year one stored in one place!

Oh, and I am also crossing another thing off my list... I called Verizon and had them take the Internet access off of my cell phone. Andy had signed me up for a $5 a month plan. Fantastic. I have to watch him like a hawk with anything electronic!!!