Lost Memories

For quite some time I was blogging about my family and our activities I even had a family website, but life got so hectic that there just wasn't enough time to write. This was a huge mistake on my behalf because two months ago our hard drive containing all our photographs died, and the back up as well, losing all those memories. I have learnt a valuable lesson from this...not only to make sure you have more than one back up of your pictures, but that you need to blog or journal and include those pictures some where, you might not have all the pictures if something bad were to happen but at least you will have the ones that are important. So from now on I am going to post as often as I can to keep those memories alive.

Many things that happen in the course of your life might not seem like big things and you never realize how important it is to hold on to those memories until someone asks you about them and you can't remember. Many people have amazing memories and can remember every like the name of their first dog when they were a young child; or the name of the street they lived on when they were three. Some of us are not so lucky, we can't remember our first grade teacher at all let alone her/his name, we moved so many times that we can't remember the name of the town we lived in when we were three let alone the name of the street. Tragedy changes your memories as well, I used to be able to ask my mother and she would be able to tell me the answers to these questions, but since my father's accident she can't remember much of anything that happened through out her life. For this reason I have tried very hard to document my children's lives, some people would call it hording, but for me I try to keep the things that will tell them the things that might be important to them one day. Pictures are a great way of documenting a child's life, there is nothing that state what happened better than an image freezing the moment.

When my husband first bought me a Canon Rebel he told me they were digital pictures so I could take as many as I wanted and delete the good ones, and print off the good ones, but instead I keep all the pictures on the hard drive thinking that one day I would print off the good ones and make an album of memories for each of my children. I had several pictures, and last year I was the class photographer, everyone knew that if they missed the event chances were good I got a picture of their children...now I don't even have the pictures of my own children. I guess it takes a tragedy like this to show us the error of our ways, from now on print off the good ones and make those albums for the children because you never know what might happen.

I want to say that even though I am devastated by the loss of years of pictures I am thankful that all I lost were pictures. After seeing the real tragedies of places like Slave Lake, where people lost everything I value the fact that all I lost was a few pictures, it could have been much worse. My heart goes out to those people who have lost so much more than I and have nothing left but the memories to document their lives.