a year in review

I did it... I finished phase one of my boy-gift project. The photo album for 2005 came out really, really well, if I do say so myself, and I am pleased to have at least one year done and organized. I highly recommend Picaboo. I had trouble ordering the album due to the very high traffic on their site today, and a live person who actually lives and works in this country very patiently and kindly walked me through various fixes until I was able to complete the order. With humor! And friendliness! And did I mention patience?

The high volume of traffic was due to the fact that they were running a "buy one, get one free" promotion. This applied no matter how many you purchased. I was so fired up about getting four albums for the price of two (as well as getting one year under my belt) that I decided that I would try to whip out another one before the offer expired at midnight tonight. After all, I had figured out the program at this point, right? And I knew how to work it that much more quickly, right? Never mind that I estimate it took me about 25 hours to complete the first one. I am nothing if not completely delusional about time.

I went to upload the photos from last year -- because I discovered that it is hard to work too far back, and I was resolved to start each year as soon as it was finished, due to this memory problem I am having that only seems to be getting worse by the day. I quickly discovered, however, we had taken very few photos in 2008.

In fact, entire months had elapsed with only a minimal amount of shots. Of those, many consisted of photo-journals shot by Terzo as he walked around the house. A representative sample (from one day alone, and this is just a sample of that particular set):

The vast remainder were, unfortunately, taken by me -- but only to document certain events for this here blog. Turns out blogging is really, really bad in this regard. As fascinating as random pictures of knitting, sandwiches and sheep may be, they don't really lend themselves to creating a quality photo album chock-full of cherished family memories.

Who you gonna call in such dire circumstances?

Your family, of course. Thank goodness for my parents and sister-in-law faithfully snapping away at every piano recital, birthday party and family get-together. Right now, they are the only thing standing between me and photo album disaster. Not to mention that whole "mother of the year" award thing, and we all know how doomed I am on that particular account.