Carys' 3rd Birthday AND The Dangers of Efficiency

First - The Price of Efficiency - I have been digital scrapbooking, and my 40gb hard drive was full. So, Greg purchased a huge hard drive and replaced the old one on my computer. Ever since then, I cannot get Shutterfly Studio to work. It cannot find My Pictures on the computer. This has been a constant source of aggravation for me. I LOVED Shutterfly Studio for two reasons: 1) It worked with the way I already had my pictures organized (in folders by year and month and event) rather than insisting on organizing them some other way (as my camera software does). 2) It had a great Screen Saver program. I gave each picture I wanted as part of my screen saver the keyword "screensaver" and the program used only those pictures. I didn't have to use every picture in one folder on the computer. I have been unable to find any other software (especially free software) that would work this way, and I don't have hours to spend learning some new software.

Greg spent hours on the phone two different times with Shutterfly trying to get this to work to no avail. One thing we noticed was that the pictures seemed to be stored in two separate places on my computer, once in My Pictures and again in a My Pictures folder which was in the My Documents folder. Greg thought that might be what was causing the confusion, so he deleted one set of pictures.

Last weekend, I saw that the pictures were still in two places on my computer. What a waste of space! So, being ever organized and efficient, I decided to delete one set. Well, I guess I deleted the wrong set, because it deleted all the pictures from both places on my computer. I lost everything. They weren't in the recycle bin, and they were unrecoverable from the hard drive even though we tried two different programs that were supposed to recover them.

Thankfully, we had backed up the hard drive to an external hard drive on 12/26, and I was able to recover all the pictures previous to that date. I also had whatever pictures I'd uploaded to my blog since then - Carys painting her toenails, Winter Encampment, New Year's Eve. Unfortunately, I had uploaded the pictures from Carys's birthday to the computer, erased them from my camera, but not yet blogged about this event. Therefore, I lost all the pictures from her birthday! Sigh!

Two of my children had taken pictures from her birthday, and there were a few good ones. So, I'm grateful to at least have a record of this auspicious event. I think I need to be less efficient. :) On top of it all, I STILL can't make Shutterfly Studio work or find anything else that works like it did. :(

Carys's 3rd birthday was Saturday, 1/17. The boys were headed to a CAP field trip, so we needed to open her gifts early. The disadvantage to a birthday so close to Christmas is trying to come up with gifts, especially for the 4th child in a family. The advantage of a birthday at this time of year is that you can often hit the Black Friday or after Christmas sales for gifts. That was what we managed to do this year.

Gerren stayed up VERY late Friday night putting this train table together. We got it for an awesome price at Target before Christmas.


I had to use a birthday tablecloth to cover it up!


Carys loved it and has had a blast playing with it ever since.


Carys's other gift was also a pre-Christmas find. She loved it also but can't figure out how to turn the handles. When she needs to turn, she stops, gets off, and picks the Power Wheels up, scooting it where she wants it to go.


After the boys got home from their field trip, we headed to Tampa for Winter Jam. We had dinner at Tia's Tex Mex first. We hadn't been to Winter Jam in several years, since it moved from a big church in Lakeland to the Sun Dome in Tampa. We thought the bigger venue would be less crowded. No way! It was awful. But the music was good anyway. We saw Stephanie Miller, Pure NRG, Francesca Battistelli, New Song, Hawk Nelson, Brandon Heath, and Toby Mac.

Carys is praising the Lord to a New Song worship song!