Creating and Preserving Memories

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

When there was an opportunity to blog about Shutterfly and their photo books, it couldn’t have come at a more opportune yet poignant time.  It turns out Charles Dickens knew what he was talking about.  The past seven days have been, seriously, the best seven days and the worst seven days I’ve had in a long time.  Fulfilling and challenging.  Exhilarating and trying.  For a myriad of reasons.  On multiple levels and areas.  I, for one, am glad this week is over.

That being said, one of the negative aspects of this past week was a power surge that hit the house while I was gone last weekend, taking pretty much every piece of technology along with it, from dial tone and microwave to printer and hard drive, and everything in between.  My beloved hard drive.  That houses about 18 months worth of work from my job, freelancing articles and invoices, Christmas card lists, personal letters, you name it, I wrote it, it was there.  But just as importantly, photos.  Photos of cherished moments over the past year and a half.  Memories with my littles.   Their important moments and milestones.  And all the insignificant day-to-day ones too.  There is the tiniest shred of hope that some is recoverable, and I’m hoping against hope that that light still shines, but I’m prepared for it to fade without producing.

It’s certainly not the end of the world, just one of the more difficult pills to swallow this week.  To be perfectly honest, it has been an emotional week for a long list of reasons, and I hate that.  I like things that I can control and am trying to wrap by head around the things I can’t.  As a dear friend reminded me more than once … I can’t control everything, and not everything fits neatly into a box.  A lesson I still work on.

Before the hard drive failure, I had plans to get all my photos into albums.  Admittedly I still have pictures of Nick’s first year that have yet to be put into an album.  I had finally figured out how I wanted to catalog everything and now I may be back to square one.  Let this be a lesson to all of you… go back up any photos you have on your computer now.  Get a flash drive and put a second set on there.  Print your pictures and put them in albums.  Don’t put it off.  Do it, do it, do it.

Whether or not Shutterfly was sponsoring this post, I would still recommend their photo books to you (and their awesome announcements too, one of which I used to announce Madeline’s birth three years ago). Although I would love to be a scrapbooker, and have many of the accessories to do so, I don’t have the time or patience. I much prefer the photo books … clean, uncluttered, easy to lay out and free from worries of hard drive crashes! And I am moving “organize photos and order photo books” to the top of my list, without question.

This weekend, the kids and I are going to drag out my boxes and boxes of photos and begin the task of at least sorting them by category and year, and go from there.  Once I see what is salvageable from my hard drive, ordering photo books is next on the list.

Have an awesome weekend!  Take tons of photos, of anything and everything.  And back them up.  Please.

P.S. Are you a blogger, too? Click here to register for a chance at 50 free announcements!

This post is part of a series sponsored by Shutterfly. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.