Photo Albums

So Kyrie was not feeling well this morning, had no appetite, and was running a temp of 99.0.  If Ken was home, I'd have just left her home with him and gone to church myself. But he's out of town visiting his Dad in Hawaii (his dad is in poor health); Ken gets home tonight. So I opted to stay home from church and not expose people to whatever bug Kyrie has, mild though it may be. (Just a bit ago, I discovered a huge wad of Kleenex where she had been sitting on the couch, so I think it was probably for the best.) For the same reason, we didn't go to the Parents Meeting (as in, parents of kids in Kyrie's First Communion classes) that we were supposed to go to today.

With my day suddenly looking more open, I ambitiously decided to start sorting my photos. The last time I put photos in an actual photo album was, apparently, just after Kyrie was born in 2003. I have a shoebox and a shoebox-sized basket full of random miscellaneous photos. And when I say random, I mean that it appears as if someone took my entire lifetime's worth of photos so far (at least up to when I switched to a digital camera) and shuffled them like a deck of cards. I'd find a photo from my high school years, followed by one of Kyrie's baptism, followed by one from when Elijah was about one, followed by one from my wedding, followed by one from when I was 10, followed by one from my time in Seattle, followed by one from Kyrie's birth.

I sorted them into:
"From before Ken and I got married"
"Wedding"
"Kyrie's babyhood"
"Everything after Elijah was born"
"After we moved to Oregon" (That was about when we switched to a digital camera, so there aren't too many of those.)

Most of the first three categories are backups of photos that I already have in my albums, so it wasn't *too* hard to get them sorted into the little photo envelopes - and I labelled them with sticky notes so that I hopefully won't ever have to do this again. I got some, but not all, of Kyrie's baby pictures into the album.  But the "after Elijah was born" stack is about a foot high, covering two years worth of photos (including duplicates - duplicates, I may add, which are NOT next to their copies, but are shuffled just as randomly).

There are several baby photos in there which I cannot for the life of me decide which baby it is. I threw out a number of photos that basically showed nothing at all. (There's this one photo where the top half - or the bottom half, you can't tell - is red, and the other half is black. I believe I found FOUR identical copies of this completely useless photo. The fact that I still have them is proof that I used to be a pack rat, I guess.) There was also one or two photos of people who I didn't recognize, and wasn't even sure if I was *supposed* to recognize them or not. Egads. :)

Progress is being made, though, and I'm looking forward to whenever it might be done. I'm motivated to do this now, because a friend gave me a code for a free photobook from Shutterfly, and I want to figure out what photos to put in there. (Good till the end of the month, I think... Shutterfly is also offering me a 50-free-prints deal, which I want to use to print off some of the better digital photos from the post-Oregon years, and add them to the albums too. Also good only til the end of the month.)