Funny How Things Happen

Whew! Where to begin? I have almost wrapped up the sorting of my photos. What a long strange trip it has been. There was this terrible "glitch" that was just about sending me over the edge... Have you ever put something VERY important away for safe keeping... and forgotten where you put it? You rack your brain and try to figure out your own logic... but it just does not come to you. So you search and search and search - and go back and search the same places again? That is where I have been since I started the massive organization project.

When my son was 18, he asked me if he could have his photo album. He wanted to show a girl some of his photos from when he was a baby. (It is always a girl that gets these problems going LOL!) So, of coarse, I say NO WAY!!!! I decided the nicest thing I could do is to pick out my very favorite photos which represent his childhood ... tape them to white paper, and have color copies made. I even had the 30 page booklet bound for him and everything. (keep in mind - this is 1998 - and technology has not really taken off yet). So now, it is 2009 and I STILLLL have not put the photos back into the photo albums. No, that would have been the sane thing to do. Instead, I had put them in a folder for safe keeping until I got a "round tuit". You guessed it... I have been hunting for the folder. These are my SERIOUSLY favorite photos... and some of them I do not own the negs to. (taken by family - old boyfriends of sisters, ex-souses of sisters etc...)

While getting everything together, I am sure I have seen them in the past couple months, but I just cannot figure out where. I want to make a scrapped photo book for him for graduation... and I cannot find the best of all the photos. ARGGG!!!!!

Fast forward to yesterday. I thought I would give it one more try, before putting out a call to the boy, requesting the booklet I made, so I can at least try to scan the color copies. Still no luck - and I looked EVERYWHERE again... some places twice - again.... So I left a message for Boy... and decided I had done all I could, and let it go.

Then came an odd phone call. It was from a cousin of my mothers - whom she had not seen since she was a very young child. He was working on a family tree, and had heard that I had unearthed some info a few years back. We chatted for awhile. Aparently he had spoken to my sister. He had in his possesion an old photo of my grand father when he was 2. Only a couple of my blog-buddies have been around since my early posts, so you may remember the photo restoration I did for mom...the one that nearly made me crazy - (oh wait... I already am that... LOL)

Bear with me... this is all going somewhere.

Here is the photo as mom sent it to me - for you new friends - It had stuck to the glass, and broken... and pieces were missing...

then I fixed it the best I could. If you notice, my great grandmother's hand is missing... so I gave her one of mine - which originally had a babies finger wrapped around my finger... so I had to cut off my middle finger and fuse it with one of the others... GOTTA LOVE PHOTOSHOP!!!!!!

The the cousin shows up and emails me the actual photo in its undamaged glory!!! Yeah - where was he 2 years ago? I actually feel pretty good, as my great grandmother has the same hands I me in reality (pretty close anyway... LOL) - except I am pretty sure she did not wear dark nail polish back in the day. See for yourself... here it is.

Ok, now I am on a mission to find the family tree stuff. While tearing through a cupboard in my office (which would be a logical place for me to put these papers... Guess what I found! YEP ~ This is me doing the extremely HAPPY dance around my office. I found the lost photos. And no, I have not seen them in 2 years... because I have not been in that cupboard for two years. Correct that - I have been scanning slides from there this week, but I thought all the notebooks and folders in there contained school stuff. OOPS, I seem to have been wrong.

To give you an idea of how priceless these photos are, I made a layout

A picture may be worth a 1,000 words, but TWO pictures can tell the whole story!!!! That is my mom, while she was still getting used to her two grand children. She is an old hand at it now... Those two, my son and niece went from sweet little angels... to three year olds in a span of a couple hours. How lucky we were to have someone tell the story. One page made for the book - only about 40 more to go. (credits: Papers - Melanie - Creekside Cottage Designs - From her Grandma's Parlour Kit Stitching Frames are from Digital Fingers - and the butterflies and paper overlay is from crops2dawn. They are all very talented designers... so check them out.

One last piece of business: I got an award... WOO HOO! Thank you Miss Croppie. I am hoping you don't mind if I slack a little and maybe pass it out in my next post. This one has taken my ALL DAY - sorry it was so long...

I must now get on with my day... I have photos to scan and pages to create. Thank heavens I have until mid April to get 'er done!

Ciao for Naio ~

eila