Once upon a time, Ezra went to the mountains all by herself!

I'm sure you can tell right away that this is not a current picture of little Ezra Grace. In fact it was taken August 10, 2009 -- shortly before my computer crashed, shortly after I downloaded all of these pictures to said laptop... and deleted them off of the camera. I had thought I was being so efficient, clearing off the camera so we'd have plenty of space for more pictures! After several computer crashes, though -- which cost me pieces of my undergraduate thesis (yes, while I was writing it), basically all the music I'd accrued in college, and (so I thought) some very precious pictures of my firstborn, like the pictures of her birth -- I've learned not to trust computers for storage. I do have an external drive (given to me by my uncle to store an overwhelming quantity of music that had been my dad's -- remarkably, there is space leftover for other purposes), and I have a Snapfish account where I now keep those pictures that are the most important to me. It has been a very painful lesson to learn.

After my laptop crashed, the pictures that hurt the most to lose were the pictures of Ezra's birth. Sure, most of them were blurry and unflattering (I'm talking about my sweat-drenched self here, not the little one), but there is nothing in the world like pictures of your birth. I'm a very visual person, and the kind of person who would put family photos pretty high on my list of things to save in a house fire. Looking at those pictures take me right back to that morning (and the night before, and the afternoon after...), even though my memories of it don't necessarily fit perfectly with what was apparently going on (I sort of forgot, I think, that at some point I took off all my clothes... not something I would normally do with four other people standing around) -- but that's what labor does to your perception of things, I guess. Every contraction just took me somewhere far away -- because I had to focus. Yes, contractions will just happen to you -- but if you've ever been through labor, you understand why you need to focus through them. Otherwise -- for me, anyway -- I would've just been flailing around and yelping in pain and not making a lot of use of them.

I did still have some of my birth pictures -- shortly after Ezra's birth, I e-mailed some of them to my mom -- but, in the interest of saving time, I sent her about a third to one-half of them (she saw all of them about a week later when she visited), so I did still have those. But I wanted every single picture, and it broke my heart that I lost any.

Then this week, I finally decided to get it together and see what I needed to do to recycle my old laptop -- it was just taking up space on small bookshelf that we want to get rid of anyway. This morning I decided it was worth a shot to see if I could salvage anything, just before I mailed the thing off for recycling. The kind of crash my computer suffered was a kind of fake virus software invasion -- constant pop-ups warning me that I needed to purchase antivirus software IMMEDIATELY, which pop-ups were of course themselves the virus. Just after the crash I had tried to put some pictures on a disc, but the pop-ups were so pervasive and slowed down the computer so much that there was no way I could burn even a single picture to a disc.

But somehow, when I plugged up the old laptop and turned it on today, things were working a little better. I still got the same old pop-ups, but this time I was able to drag them out of the way and copy the most important pictures I'd thought I'd lost forever. I almost held my breath waiting for the disc to finish burning, but I wasn't convinced they were saved until I loaded the disc up on the new laptop -- and there they were, every single one. I had tears in my eyes looking at all of them.

Praise the Lord that I get to see my little girl again as she was at six days old.