2011 video footage

I'm going to take a break from describing the many infractions of my neighbor Mary Ann.  If you have enjoyed reading about her clueless, rude ways - rest assured she has been supplying me with material for 9 years now.  Since I have only recently decided to share my Mary Ann stories, I have a few other tidbits up my sleeve to write about next week.  Promise.

The youngest four (they call themselves 'the Fabulous Four') building sand castles. Aug. 2011

Back in the summer of 2011 Coach and I were invited to vacation at our friends' summer house.  To call this house a summer home doesn't do it justice.  It was built for their large family and was located right on Lake Michigan.  The countless bedrooms and bathrooms are decorated beautifully.  They developed the land and created this picturesque little neighborhood complete with a wonderful pool and private beach.  We were thrilled!

Me - taking a break from filming - getting a kiss from my girls!

We spent two and a half weeks there while work was being done on our house.  I captured tons of photos and video of the kids playing on the beach, jumping in the waves, and relaxing.

Cool picture of brothers chasing each other - use your imagination to guess how funny the video version was.  

Imagine my disgust when I recently discovered that I had deleted the footage of this vacation along with several other months of family movies from 2011.  The issue began with the best of intentions.  I was trying to preserve our video memories.

Unlike the home movies my father took decades ago, I have no reels of 8 mm film to deal with.  The first video camera Coach and I bought years ago saved images on little cassette tapes. When that camera broke, we invested in a digital video camera.  Since that purchase back in 2010, all home movies are uploaded to our home computer.  It has been gnawing at me that our home computer could crash and we could lose all of our movies.  In order to avoid that scary scenario, I began editing and burning those movies to DVDs.

My movie making software required more space on my hard drive than what I had available, so the first step in my project was to create space on the hard drive.  In hindsight I wish I would've reached out to Best Buy and asked for suggestions.  Non - technological me decided to back up my photos on flash drives, check that they were deposited at Snapfish, and purge those files.  I thought I was being careful.

A few weeks ago I realized that through that process I had inadvertently deleted all of our home movies from May 2011- Jan 2012.  Let's just say it was an emotional weekend.  I've tried to keep the whole disaster in perspective, but as an admitted home movie addict - it bums me out.

My hard drive has been sent away by Best Buy in order to try to recover the files.  I have heard it is a costly process.  Perhaps I suffer from some unnamed diagnosis - like 'this does not compute' syndrome.  I simply can't put a price on getting those movies back.

I'm guessing that I deleted them in February, but I really have no idea.  Fortunately, I have a million photos of those months.  I'm guessing that I could create a flip book of the pictures to recreate the action I've lost.

Riding the waves on a big tube - Aug 2011.

I know that in the grand scheme, not seeing the cute retro footage of the kids playing on the beach at our friends' amazing house for that awesome August 2011 vacation is not the end of the world . . . especially when you consider that I have countless hours recorded of the crew from every other time-frame.

I'm still crossing my fingers that Best Buy works some magic for me.  Each day that goes by with no contact from Best Buy makes me wonder:  is no news good, or bad?  And with just the thought of it -there's the pit in my stomach again!

In the meantime as Mother's Day approaches, I am NOT feeling like mother of the year.  As the protector of our family memories, I failed.

Too bad we can't just dress the kids in similar looking bathing suits and try to recreate the lost scenes.  Families recreate still photos of siblings all the time on Facebook or in funny Christmas cards.  We'd have to try to get invited back to this same beach house, and I suspect that we broke too many things for that to be possible.