Two things we lost this summer.

As school ended this year, we looked forward to our traditional summertime activities: end of year school wrap-ups, awards and such,three immediate birthdays, two major summer holidays, minor trips to visit Aunt Terry, the highly anticipated Jenkins Family Thingy, and family picnics, hot dog roasts,etc. plus milestones for Avonlea and Jacob. And all the crazy antics the kids come up with in their boredom, along with our garden's progress.
We, of course plan to store these memories on our computer, which holds a crazy amount of other memories, not to mention all of our passwords, access to websites such as Blogger, and other information that I don't want to look up each time I access the sites. So of course I over loaded it with pictures and it died! Well, actually I think it had more to do with the fact that it is over five years old than what I stored on it. Regardless, it has been a test to not have a computer!
Just to teach me not to get comfortable, or how important a backup of our pictures is, I lost the memory disk to our camera. Full to capacity with all the above listed activities. It was carefully stored in the pocket of the camera. But no more. Sick does not describe it. Sorry can't come close. Sad doesn't begin to express my feelings. Gone are the 10 year old birthday pictures, one of the last few years of Spencer as a young boy, not even a little boy anymore and this the year he told me he was too big for a theme birthday party and wanted just an ice cream cake instead. Gone are the darling pictures of Olivia and her "wedding birthday" cake, dressed in her wedding dress-ups. Only at six would you want such a thing! Gone are the pictures of Jacob's birthday cake depicting his obsession with Buzz Lightyear, and maybe even more sad than his birthday pictures, the pictures of his last day of one, along with proof of the HOURS I spent on birthday cakes during July.
Each time I think about it, I realize more of the memories we no longer have documented: Matthew's Cache Children's Choir performance singing "we all know frogs go la dee dah dee dah", Olivia's end of year ballet recital at the Ellen Eccles theater with her bouquet of flowers she was so proud of. Olivia's haircut: from waist length to shoulder length. And home improvement project before and after pictures.
I guess I should be grateful it wasn't full of blessing or baptism pictures. But dang it! Has anyone seen a memory card sitting around anywhere?!