Picture Overload

How many photos do you have of your kids?  How many do you actually have printed out?  If you're anything like me, you have thousands of pictures, all stored on various computers and phones and very few actually printed out.

In two short weeks, Shannon will be Star of the Week at school.  Although I'm still not quite sure what all that entails, I have been informed that a big part is sending in pictures from Shannon's life thus far.  He is obsessed with this - both with being Star of the Week and with pictures of himself.  Back in the day when I only had one child and more time on my hands, I made a photo book from the first year of his life.  There are pictures of me pregnant, seeing him for the first time, him in the NICU, him with a face full of peas, his chubby cheeks and it ends with his first birthday party.  He will spend half an hour or more going through the book, talking about each picture and I can see his little brain trying hard to remember back that far.  He loves thinking about what he was like as a little baby and loves comparing all those things to his new little sister Maren and what she's like right now.

So, I have one photo book covering one year of the six and half years of his life.  Pathetic.  Even more pathetic is that I have zero photo books for Quinn or Sully (I'll give myself a pass on not having one for Maren as she's only four months).  I know two kids who are going to grow up with some serious middle child issues!

I need pictures people, real, printed out pictures.  And, apparently I need poster board to adhere them to. 

With this in mind, I began digging through all of my digital photos.  What a mess.  Tons of folders with tons of pictures, somehow not all in chronological order and also somehow a million and one duplicates.  ARGH!  I remember reading somewhere once that the best way to get a handle on digital photos is to actually delete all the ones that are the best of the best.  Sounds easy, until you start looking at all those cute faces and think oh, but I want to remember that moment even if it was just half a second before the next picture was taken.  It would seem that as with most things in my life, I'm a little bit of a hoarder and filled with a whole lot of clutter.  But, I have a plan.  I bought a Picture Keeper  photo storage stick that will hold approximately, 250,000 photos. Yea, that should cover things for quite a few more years.  Since the stick will search my computer for photos and then save them to a portable drive, it suggests you get all your photos organized prior to downloading all of them.  And so, the last few nights, instead of mindlessly sitting back and enjoying the Real Housewives of Atlanta (Gone with the Wind fabulous!) or Beverly Hills (hate me if you must but I love Brandi), I have been renaming folders by months and years, deleting duplicates and just reliving the last six years with each photo I look at.  It's been a great ride so far.

Here's one picture Shannon really wants to use:

Awww, my little Anakin Skywalker and Quinny owl.