Say Cheese! ...18,472 Times

I got myself a new computer for Christmas and I love it. The only problem with getting a new computer is that my old computer is full of stuff that needs to be taken care of. Like, really full. I have thousands of songs and years of old school stuff... but what takes up the most room is the pictures.

Namely, the pictures of Mason.

18,472 of them, to be exact.

No, I'm not kidding. I'm thinking it's a form of hoarding, except instead of Disney Collectables or McDonalds Happy Meal toys, I'm hoarding enough pictures that, if I printed them all out and made a flip book, would allow me to watch my child go from birth to age 3.5 for a second time.

Those pictures take up 32 gigabytes of space on that computer. 32 GIGS! Obviously I'm not going to put them on my new one, so I'm going to get a giant flash drive and call it a day. But first, I need to go through them. Because most likely, those 18,000+ pictures include at least 500 blurry ones, 800 of the back of Mason's head, and 2,000 more that are pretty much identical to the one taken a millisecond before it.

So yeah, I have a lot of deleting to do. The problem is, I can barely bring myself to do it. So far I've gone through Mason's first year. It's awesome to look at those pictures, because it's so easy to forget what he looked like and the things we did together. Memories are so fleeting and no matter how hard you want to hold on to exactly how things are, they fade way too fast. It's so strange, because I do tend to forget things like the way Mason's big toothless smile looked, but as soon as I start looking at those pictures I remember EXACTLY what I felt when he smiled it at me three years ago.

I only deleted about 500 pictures out of the 5,000ish that I took during his first year. It might not sound like a ton, but man, it was painful. Pushing that 'empty trash' button was pretty tough. All those back-of-the-head pictures suddenly seemed like something I really, really needed to hold on to.

Next up is scrapbooking that first year, and I can promise I won't be printing and scrapping the remaining 4,500 pictures. But I will definitely be holding onto them.