Suellen, the young artist (and I mean real artist) at work.

A few may remember the computer theft of February 27, 2009, and how I lost not only my computer (rather old and ready for replacement) but a new scanner fax printer and most important, a slew of digital photos. Imagine my happiness when I found, on a disk in a pile on the bookshelf, an archive taken in 2005 with over 1000 pictures, almost entirely of the children between 2002 and 2005.

I downloaded them and there they were: the photos of my youngest as a baby. He was so cute! The camping trip memories I’d assumed we’d never see again, my oldest daughter’s high school graduation, my first flock of chickens and my daughter holding them. I could spend the whole morning taking a walk down memory lane.

What do I think as I see the pictures? I think that things were better back in the day than i gave them credit for. One of my mottoes is “I can’t complain but sometimes I still do” and through the years that those photos were taken, I probably worried and complained a lot. But what comes through of these photos is that things were really okay, and actually, they still are. We are living our lives, perhaps not particularly famously, but we’re here and we’re together. As a family, that’s the main thing, I think, that I often forget.

So here, for old (or not so old) times sake, are a couple of the recovered photos:

Angelo poses in a baseball jumper with a baseball

Tonia with two friends from school and her little sister

Angelo with his grandfather on a camping trip in Missouri

Joanna and a friend