Do you know how it’s like when it dawns on you that you lost an enormous amount of digital files, namely, photographs from the first 5 years of your daughters’ lives? You don’t?
I’ll tell you how.
First, it would feel like a pail of cold water was dumped over your head. You’d spend hours in front of your computer, digging into a pile of old CDs and external hard disks, and you’d go through them many times over in hopes that you just missed a folder somewhere.
You would fight with your husband because it should be his job to keep those files safe. He would argue that he expected YOU to keep those files safe. Shortly you’d both realize you have to stop pointing fingers and you need to stay united through this, um, tragedy. >.<
In other words, it was quite intense!
I didn’t realize I would have so many feelings about losing photographs. I mean, how could we not have kept a backup somewhere? Those files have got to be somewhere in the “cloud”, right? We are millennials, after all, no matter how far into the older end of the spectrum we are.
The silver lining, of course, is yes, somehow we’ve got our devices synced into the cloud. When the twins were younger we posted so much about them on social media. My husband had a Google drive that synced into his gadgets, which automatically backed up his files. And I, meanwhile, dumped a lot of those photos on this blog. (I mean, remember that 52-week Challenge?)
It goes without saying, of course, that we had more photographs in those lost folders than the ones that made it to the internet. It seems that the raw files are gone forever, and now, we have to, little by little, gather copies of these images from everywhere in the web, organize them, and build up a new repository of memories.
And this is why we really should start printing photographs! All of us, parents! Stat!!
This is why we sometimes have to resort to social media to timestamp memories. (Because who doesn’t want to see those “on this day” posts on your Facebook feed?)
This is why we blog those stories we want the web to remember forever.
And this is why this blog is going back to its roots of simply being a documentation of life. (More about this another time.)
PS. The above photographs were from a few Sundays ago, right after church. Nothing much really, just one of those days I remembered to capture the moment. To remind me that anywhere with these three is home.
PPS. Have you seen The Purpose Blog yet? It’s live, and if you subscribed to my list, you’d know by now what this new blog project is all about. Go ahead, take a look!
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