In a moment....

.... you can accidentally push delete and suddenly every picture you took in 2009 is gone. It doesn't matter that you have not printed any pictures yet and have no way to ever see those 28,000 pictures again...you pushed delete, they are gone.


This was how our school year started. I was blissfully reading a book on the couch, sipping some tea, relaxed and happy until I heard the strangest gutteral noise come from my Renaissance man that I have ever heard. I came running. Something disastrous happened, I just never would have imagined what.

There is nothing like the moments right after you realize that everything is truly gone that memorializes 2009. Birthday parties, holidays, vacations, school days...it all flashed before my eyes and I just started to laugh. I was too shocked to cry.

We called a dear friend from church - now renamed our computer doctor - and he has spent the last 6 weeks working on seeing if he could recover these pictures. Hundreds of dollars later, weeks of work, and lots of waiting....he is sitting in the studio right now loading all our pictures back into our computer. It's still a massive mess as recoveries like this are never neat - some pictures are gone forever while others are duplicated hundreds of times. It's a pile to sort through - where there once was 26,000 pictures, neatly filed away in monthly folders there is now 110,000 pictures in one giant random mess.

But I don't care - I get to remember, through pictures, what my little gal looked like on her 6th birthday and what soccer stud looked like scoring his umpteenth goal.

Feeling light and happy. Such a close call makes me realize how precious pictures are to all of us. They help us remember this amazing thing we call life. Without them, it's just a blur...but with them, moments are captured, memories preserved, and our stories memorialized.