i'm so glad ...

I'm so glad ...
... that my parents left the country for 5 months this year
... that Sam loves to brag
... that I unashamedly ply friends and family with emails full of Henry and Walter photos
... that we live far away from our families
... that I've spent how many hundreds of dollars on getting photos printed?!
Yep, honestly, I'm thrilled and very, very thankful.

Ok, let me backtrack a little ...
Something happened about two weeks after Walter was born. My computer crashed. My hard drive failed inexplicably. My heart spasmed.
And the obvious question is, did I back it up? And the stupid, but truthful, answer is ... no. That's been on my to-do list for the past 3 years but as I was under the impression that Macs don't fail, well, I let that slide. Assuming I was ok. Apparently not. Random me. Stupid, embarrassed, horrified, heartbroken me. And let's just say I am a documenter of life and let's just say there was over 6000 photos on my computer and let's just say my hard drive failed.

Heartbroken.

We've replaced my hard drive and upgraded my computer now and we have the old hard drive back. Shopping around to where we can send it for data recovery, if that's possible. And if possible, very expensive. Now I'm trying to compile what remnants of my photo library as I can. It's like grabbing one more precious item on the way out the door of a burning building.

Thankfully (and I can't stress that enough) I still had most of Walter's birth pictures left on both cameras. And thankfully Sam has 1800 photos on his old laptop which I'm now copying and transferring over. But that stops just short of Henry's birth and has huge gaps in photos I took in the past. Yet thankfully every photo I uploaded and had printed off at our local photo shop is stored there online and so I was able to get a disk of all those photos. All the big moments from Henry's life that I printed off for both sets of grandparents, Sam's brag book at work, and all the scrapbooking I've done so far. And thankfully I just spent over an hour going through all my emails, pulling out all the photos I sent off to my parents in Scotland, or to friends after parties and events, or to family just to show off Henry's wonderful smile. And even more so, thankfully I uploaded hundreds of photos right to my parents' own computer while we were staying there over Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, plus more on Sam's parents and my sister's computers too, those important events and memories from our trips and reunions that I would have been devastated to lose.

So culling a little bit here and there, I've collected quite a few. Though not all, certainly not. And the worst is remembering certain photos I took from Henry's first year that I neither emailed or printed off or archived in some way and that maybe, potentially, those may be lost.

But today I'm thankful for each one that I'm finding and saving.
Still, it's a very hard lesson learned.