Remember When

I'm working on getting a slide show ready for Owen's Eagle Court of Honor coming up in a week, which has meant all kinds of technical stuff I hadn't intended to get to for a while. When he was born we didn't have cell phones or digital cameras. We had a large clunky desktop computer. All of the photos I have of the first 12 years of his life, in fact, are prints. So once I found all of the digital pictures I wanted to use (no shortage of them from the few years especially), I had to track down actual photos and get them on my computer. Initially that was a little daunting, but has turned into something quite fun. The scanner and my laptop have taken over one end of the kitchen table for the foreseeable future because I've realized how much needs to be transferred from its low-tech form into digital images.

It's been a long time since I've looked at any of these photos. I felt grateful for the visual souvenirs of events I had long forgotten.

See how this handsome boy has grown in the last eighteen years:

Owen, just a few days old. We still have the brown floral couch you can see, although it's in much sadder condition.

The first Pinewood Derby

First day of senior year

The paper scrapbooking has long since given way to storing everything digitally. I've made some scrapbooks on Shutterfly, an online scrapbook and photo site that offers lots of fun services for doing creative things with photos. My kids love looking through those. With my oldest getting ready to leave the nest (sniff sniff), I think it's time to get all of those old photos organized so each child can have their own childhood scrapbooks. I remember worrying as I was putting together the paper scrapbooks about possible arguing over who was going to get the scrapbook because I wasn't making four copies of every photo to create books for each child. The digital route solves that. Sadly, I can't go back to take pictures to make the photo count equal for each one (that old story about the oldest child having the most photos and the count steadily dropping for each ensuing child certainly held true for the paper photos, but not once we got a digital camera...sorry Evan!).

I'll share some of those old pictures here as I work on getting them on my computer.