Digital cameras are killing me

If someone wanted to do my family a favor, they would buy me a 35mm camera for Christmas. Otherwise, my children will grow up with no pictures of their childhood. Digital cameras are a great invention, and I love how much my camera holds, don't get me wrong. But that is exactly the problem. My camera holds too much. And, if it runs out of room, I just move pictures on to my computer. Where they sit. And sit. And sit. I even have a folder on my computer entitled "to print". Maybe I need to change the name to "the best of" so in 20 years, my children know where to look for all the good pictures.

I'm notorious for having empty picture frames in our house. The pictures are either outdated, or they house some other family. We moved into our new house in June, but it took me forever to decorate. I'm slightly (okay, a little more than slightly) OCD, so everything has to be perfect. Just the thought of hanging stuff on the wall gave me an anxiety attack. I finally decided to host the weekly neighborhood coffee at the end of September, in hopes that it would encourage me to finish decorating the house. I had picture frames that had been waiting to be put into a collage on the wall, and thanks to the coffee, they finally got there. Only problem, when people arrived, half of the frames still had the commercial family print inside from when you buy it. The other half had pretty backgrounds from a grouping I did in our old kitchen. HOW EMBARRASSING!!! A couple of weeks later, we hosted an Aggie game and I filled the frames with the commercial prints with maroon paper. Somehow, in my head, this made things better. There they have sat.

Well, I'm hosting the neighborhood coffee again tomorrow. Not only are the picture frames still without actual family pictures, but I just spent the last hour trying to find a picture to put in a new blank frame that sits on our entry table. I wanted a family picture, but all I could find was a picture of me and Daniel from before we got married (we look like babies) or a horrible picture of me and Emily. Either way, there is no good picture to put in the frame.

Maybe I will host the coffee again in January and finally get some recent pictures up. It's all about baby steps, right?

In the meantime, I leave you with a picture tour of the pictures that do grace our walls. Keep in mind, the only reason these pictures got selected is because they are some of the only ones I had actually printed off. And we actually have some more recent ones in our bedroom, but nobody sees those. The following is what people do see.

First, the wall collage...

This next picture of from our ski trip December of 2006. We had just gotten engaged... how young and naive we were! This picture actually looks good up right now, it being Christmas and all. Only problem... this picture stays up all year long.

Here is a family picture from the pre-wedding crawfish boil Lucas (Dan's best man) threw for us.

And here is another picture from the crawfish boil. I obviously was on top of things to print out two pictures from the same party. I'm impressed, aren't you? This one is of my group of friends. Sorry, no Dan in this one.

The following picture is the only picture we have up of Emily. She was only 2 weeks old. No older picture of her exists printed off. Sad, I know.

And that is it. Out of the 14 picture frames we have in our living room and kitchen, only 4 have actual pictures.

The first step is always admittance...