Monday, January 22, 2018

Life Before Ethan...Life Now

The end of one year and the start of another always increases my “to-do” list by a mile. Work, of course, has a million things to close out, put away, re-start and do-better. So does home: thank-you cards, Christmas stuff put away, taxes, yearly lists compiled in completion, pictures backed up. The latter is always a ton of work, but also a lot of fun.

I’m a little bit OCD (I’m sorry – CDO) when it comes to backing up the hundreds of pictures Ed and I take every year. I’m especially so since between phone changes we nearly lost all the pictures from the first year of Emry’s life. Since then, I back up a lot. And while I am making a serious attempt in giving my children photo albums (or books, as the case may be) since who doesn’t love curling up and looking at old photos (not curling up and scrolling on a laptop), I simply cannot possibly include the nearly 1,000 pictures taken every year in a book. So on top of drives that back up the pictures for myself, I also have drives for both Emry and Ethan with their pictures on them. A little over the top? Maybe…but if they don’t want them, they can throw them out someday. Honestly, I won’t care.

Meanwhile, it’s been great fun scrolling through those pictures and short videos of Emry and Ethan over the past few years. One night, Ed and I watched the twenty or so short videos we have of Emry over the first year of her life. One was during her first Christmas. She’s lying on the floor under the Christmas tree. Ed’s train is going around and around, but she has no interest in that. She’s pulling at her favorite ornament: a large bell painted like a bird. It’s very cute but not laughable…so I had to ask why Ed started laughing at it.

“Look at it,” he said. “There’s my coffee cup, probably full of coffee, not two feet from her. And she doesn’t even try to get it. Ethan? That thing would have been knocked over before we started the video!”

He’s right. No wonder some days I feel completely exhausted!

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