Today has been quite the roller coaster emotionally for me. And each thing by itself was probably no big deal, but added all together it was just too much to deal with and I ended up having a good old fashioned cry. But I am jumping ahead of the story here, let me give you a little background.
About a week ago, the hard drive on our computer crashed. No warning or anything, it just died. This is the computer that the whole family uses. And on it are all the pictures we have ever taken, along with lots of videos of the kids, not to mention all the information like email addresses and such. There was also my cookbook that I had worked on for over a year, typing in all the recipes that I had saved out of newspapers, magazines and such. There were all nicely divided into categories and I referred to it often when cooking meals and treats for the family. I didn't panic at first, because, hey, this is the year 2008 and they can get information of hard drives that have been in houses that blew up. Well, okay, that is maybe only in the movies, but still, it might cost a bit of money, but it will all be restored. So Chris took it into the data recovery guys and I thought no more about it.
This afternoon Sarah had a playdate after her German class. Normally Sophie goes with her, but she stayed home sick from school, so Sarah was by herself. I told her to walk down to where she normally caught the bus and I would pick her up and take her to her friend's house. But when I got there, Sarah was no where to be found. I drove up to the school, got out of the car and walked around the playground, no Sarah. I drove back down to the bus stop, no Sarah, I drove back up to the school, driving illegally on the path the kids walk up, no Sarah. I drove back to the bus stop again, no Sarah. I drove all the way home in a panic, thinking maybe she had gotten on the bus and come home, no Sarah. Drove back to the bus stop when I realized the bus was taking the kids to swimming the next town over and Nelly, the bus driver, wouldn't have let her get on, knowing she didn't have swimming, no Sarah. Drove up to school and halfway there, walking down the road without a care in the world was SARAH!
I tell you, I have never been so happy to see a puffy pink coat in all my life. By this time I had been looking for her for almost 15 minutes, which is freaking ETERNITY when you can't find your little girl. I hugged her and kissed her a bunch of times which she patiently endured, and almost didn't take her to her playdate, I wanted to keep her close to me. It seems that after German class, Frau Meier let them play with a barnhouse in the classroom and Sarah didn't think it had been that long, just a couple of minutes, Mommy! So I come home after dropping her off and slowly get my heart rate back to normal.
Chris came home a bit early as he was still recovering from a really bad flu he had over the weekend. While we were chatting, he opened up his emails and found a message from the data recovery guys. Remember them? Well, I had almost forgotten about it. Seems they did all they could, and short of opening up the hard drive in the special "white room", to a cost of 800 Euros, there was no way to recover any of the data. What?!? You mean, all the photos since September 2006 are gone? Just gone? Yes, but in a stroke of sheer luck, Chris had downloaded most of the America photos to his laptop rather than the home computer, and also all the photos of Alexandra's birth. So those are still safe. I wasn't feeling too bad. And recipes, well, I can always get more, even though it was an awful lot of work to enter them all in. Then I remembered the Pumpkin Patch photo and just lost it. Started crying and couldn't stop for a good 15 minutes. What is the Pumpkin Patch photo, you say? Well, it's this.
Now, I know what you're thinking. Um, Amy, that photo isn't that great. I mean, it's not even IN a pumpkin patch, and the lighting for sure could be better. I know, but to me that photo is quite the accomplishment and to have it be gone forever was more than I could bear. First I lose my daughter, then I lose my photos. It was just too much for me in the space of 3 hours to deal with. Anyway, back to the photo and why it was so special. The idea came to me one day when I was surfing the gallery of my favorite scrapbook website and saw all the photos of kids in pumpkin patches. I realized that we had at least three pumpkin costumes, and boy, wouldn't that be cute to take a picture of my pumpkins in a pumpkin patch? Well, by the time I had tracked down another costume to borrow, it had snowed here, which nixed the going to an actual pumpkin patch. But still, I decided to take one indoors and I could always photoshop them into a pumpkin patch later. And then, this photo. Sarah didn't want to wear her costume, Noah said he was cold, Nick didn't want to smile, Alexandra kept getting fussy. I fought on, my determination undaunted, I would get this photo no matter what. And finally, miracle of miracles, a photo where all five kids are looking at the camera, are mostly smiling, and in focus! Anyone who has ever tried to photograph kids knows what a huge achievement that is. And that is what I see when I look at that picture.
So how did that photo come to be on my blog when it had gone to hard drive heaven? Chris got inspired during my crying fit to try one more thing. He hooked up the digital camera, whose memory card had been erased, mind you, and discovered that it wasn't completely erased. There were still 280 photos on there, one of which was the pumpkin patch photo. Yippee! as Noah likes to say. I am one happy camper. And yes, we are backing up all data on a weekly basis from now on. So the emotional roller coaster ride was over, and happily, it ended on an upswing.