Lately ...

I've been spending time going through all our digital pictures (which date back to 2001!) to delete all the blurry, heads missing, bad shots, etc, from the hard-drive. No need to store pictures I absolutely would never print up. Plus, I have a terrible habit of taking a series of 7 pictures in a row in the hopes of getting one good one.
I am not completely done and have already freed up a lot of space on the hard drive LOL!

Aside from the feeling of getting a little bit more organized around here, it's been an interesting trip down memory lane. I can't believe how little the girls look in those pictures! Little Momma was a newborn in some of them! We have a few of Little miss really young, but most pictures start around her 3rd birthday! She has changed so much and it really struck me how much she has "grown up." And even Little Man, who granted is only 21 months old now, but to see his newborn pictures ... It is so amazing looking back on them.

But I noticed a few things:
1. I have so many pictures of Little Momma laying down ... on the couch, on the floor, just laying and hanging. Not to say I don't have any pictures of her playing, but they are a small percentage of them. I have her laying and looking at books, I have her laying and holding dolls, I have her cuddling with blankets. She truly has changed the most of all my kids - you wouldn't know today that she had extensive therapy from about 18 months to 3 years old! And thank God for that truly. I am so glad how far she has come, and she had to work hard to get here and I am so thankful we are where we are today with her.

2. I have tons of pictures of the kids painting, exploring, playing dress-up, playing with rice and beans (yes, I have buckets of both for my children), of them helping me cook, of walks and parks and all sorts of fun things. But something has changed .... I don't do those things so much anymore with the kids. And that makes me feel sad truthfully. I don't know if moving into another house stopped some of it and then being sick while pregnant made some more of it stop and then having a very high maintenance child stopped the rest of it ... that's my guess. But it is time to get it back!

So I've been trying. I took the kids out last Saturday to a (free) event locally that the girls at least enjoyed. I pulled out the box of beans the other day and all three kids went crazy for them! Of course there were quite a few spills with Little man in the mix, but I didn't let that bother me! I am letting Little Man help me out more often (which is helping in two ways, I can actually accomplish housework and he's too busy "helping" me to whine about not getting my undivided attention 24/7). I have been playing blocks and barbies and trains and school with the kids. We go outside, we work together, we talk, we have more fun. We are still going in small steps but I am trying hard to get that back. And given what feels like an endless supplies of art stuff in our basement and the tight budget we are on right now, I have a feeling this is exactly the sorts of things I need to bring back before the winter weather really sets in and we are feeling housebound when the temperatures are in the teens for a week at a time!