Memories From His Father

Image via CrunchBase

My husband’s dad was an avid photographer while he was growing up, therefore, we have a lot of photos of my husband Jon as a kid.  Several years ago we were visiting Jon’s folks in Florida and his dad expressed the desire to have several boxes of slides made into photographs that he could get copies of and give to all the kids.  We brought the boxes of slides home to Missouri after our visit thinking it would be a simple process to have them converted to prints.  Au contraire.

It’s been several years since we’ve had his slides and we’ve had good intentions all along.  I’ve looked high and low for an affordable solution to this problem to no avail.  I finally found a place that was more reasonably priced here lately, but still pretty expensive.  Over 1200 35 mm slides have been sorted by date, shipped and converted to digital photos onto a CD.  Technology at its best!  When we received our CD, we immediately made copies for each of Jon’s siblings & packaged them up to ship to each of them.  Then, we uploaded the entire CD to Shutterfly, an online photo storage hub that allows you to create all sorts of gifts from your photos.  We made two photo books for Dad.  His birthday was February 8th and we wanted to have the books created & shipped to him as a gift on his birthday but it took us longer to sort the slides by the year they were taken than we thought.   Anyway, we got it done and the books are shipping to dad tomorrow!!  Several hundred dollars later, I’m just happy we were able to preserve all of those family photos that were in the process of deterioration from years of storage in their boxes.  Where family memories are concerned…money doesn’t matter.

I can’t wait to hear what he thinks about our little project.  I know he will cry.  Then he’ll call us and cry some more.  I just love that man!

Something I’ve Never Told Anyone

I was challenged the other day to write about something I had never told anyone.  When I started to think about it, I was at a loss.  Being married for 26 years, my husband probably knows all there is to know about me so what could I possibly write about that I haven’t told him all these years?  I’ve pondered this for a few days and now have decided to write about something I’ve never told anyone except for him.  My brain is tired of thinking and I have people waiting for a new blog post.  :-)

I come from a family of eight kids.  Ten if you count the two that my mom raised that weren’t hers but a neighbors.  The kids were left alone for days at a time and mom told the parents that they could live with us and the parents were fine with that.  That’s a whole other blog post for another time but of the 8 biologically related kids, I was number seven.  I have one brother younger than me.  Most of what I  remember of my childhood, was spent at home with my younger brother and the two older than me.  It was the four of us at home…the rest were grown and living in their own homes.

Now, the thing I’ve never told anyone is that there was a period of time when I was a little girl, that my three brothers and I had to go to foster homes.  I spent some time in 2 different foster homes over a period of about a year.  If the experience itself wasn’t bad enough, my brothers and I were all sent to different homes.  I’m not sure if it  was two different occasions or if there was a reason why I was moved to the second home, but I’m almost certain it was once and for some reason I was moved from the first family to the second.

I don’t remember anything about the first family except that they had a couple other foster kids and a couple of their own & that I wasn’t there very long…a week or two maybe.  I do remember a lot about the second one though.  I was there for the remainder of the time.  There was another girl my age named Stacy and an older girl named Debbie that they were in the process of adopting.  She was in high school & Stacy & I pestered her like little sisters would.  I was around 9 or 10 years old.  I remember they had a camper and we would go camping in the summer.  My foster-mother made Stacy and I matching dresses for Easter and a stuffed rabbit wearing the same dress, and beautiful easter baskets!

Eventually, we were able to move back home and life continued normally.  Whatever “normally” is.

Until next time…