Wiggles, Giggles and Sunshine at 5, 7, and 9

 I'm totally stealing the title from Laura. And with less than a month left for the kids to be all odd birthdays like this, I have to get this done now.

Alice is a huge reader and spends so much of her time reading all day every day. She's a talented monkey bar swinger and so, so clever. She's more and more independent, but still enjoys cuddles and holding my hand to skip down the street.

Isaac loves to look through books. He's close to reading, but I don't think that he'll have any issues with it clicking. I think that he'll be a huge reader too. He's strong, kind, and loves being chased. He gets along great with Lucy and they get into all kinds of trouble together. The more laughter coming from them tells me the more mess they are making.

Lucy is becoming more independent all the time too. She's still small enough that I can easily carry her. She loves playing games and still loves her bunny Berry. She, like the others, still loves the cuddles and attention.

I love them all dearly.

Strange Dream of Family

 First off I don't know what it means.

The other night shortly before I fully woke up, I was in one of those dreams where I knew it was a dream, but was still in it anyways.

I was at the cottage on the lawn beside the cottage and coming down the hill were family that would have gone to the cottage, both living and dead. Everyone looked the best possible way, not too old, healthy. They greeted me with hugs and it felt so damn good. My grandma Phillips was there, and uncle Gord, and just... everyone it was so warm. As I was hugging them I could hear myself saying that I missed them and that I really needed the hug. I was just overcome with emotions and I think that I actually woke myself up sobbing.

 I'm not sure what my brain is doing or what it means. It was just so short but happy emotions. Just so much of it.

Went to a movie

 It was raining so for a Date Day we went and saw No Time To Die. I always love spending time with Laura.

This was the first movie that I have seen in a theatre since Frozen 2 right before things shut down early 2020. Thinking about it, I think that this might be is the longest that I've spent inside somewhere that's not our home or rented place in quiet some time. It was nice to be out.

I'm very much looking forward to all the kids getting their shots and maybe, maybe doing things like this again.

Finding What was Lost

Many years ago on my old computer I had all our pictures on had the hard drive crash. I didn't have timemachine backups running (stupidly) and lost everything on that drive.

Many of the photos I had backed up to an external drive, but not all. Thankfully they were on flickr though.

For more than 10 years I've been meaning to figure out what pictures were lost and download them and... I've not yet done it. Maybe in the short term I'll just look for photos from the old camera as a starting point. I'm not sure if that's enough but it will probably be better than nothing.

Update 1: It looks like pictures that were taken between May 20th 2006 to July 16th 2006 were the ones that were lost. I also discovered that my uncle took pictures of our wedding and had the wrong date set on his camera - by a whole year. Somewhere less than 250 pictures were lost, but some of those were wedding shots from my buddies wedding.

Update 2: And after like 15 years of meaning to do something, but in a nice generic way, I threw in the towel and looked on either side of the picture above until I found the images that I was missing. Turns out it was like 73mb of 203 images. I tossed them in a set in flickr and downloaded it. Broke it up into the proper albums and tossed it onto the network drive. Yet another example of perfect being the enemy of good.