Written March 4, 2015
Dear Samuel,
You will undoubtedly see the pristine white Creative Memory photo albums of your siblings one day. They take great pride in pulling them from their place in the china hutch and flipping through the pages, reliving the first year of their life the only way they can. Their birth, first days at home, first bath, their first trips, monthly updates on their growth and progress, their first steps...it's all captured in those pages with as much loving detail as I could muster. You will see theirs and I can already picture your sweet upturned face as you look at me and ask "where is mine?". I can show it to you. I have it. Beautiful, white, just like your brother and sisters', still wrapped in plastic and as new as the day your Grannie handed it to me. We were pregnant with Elizabeth and she knew there would probably be another miracle to follow. So she took a chance and bought two when the opportunity presented itself. The albums were getting harder to find because they had been discontinued...but there will never be a picture of you in yours...
You see, I got complacent. I have, slowly, started to trust in this thing called technology. All the photos I had taken of you, from your birth until the day before your first birthday, were on my old laptop. The laptop was feeling it's age though and starting to act up. I was worried about losing our photos. Funny, now. Your daddy bought me an external hard drive to store our pictures on. I was so happy to have them in a safe place at last! The old laptop could die and all the photos would still be within a seconds reach. I had used the external hard drive several times. There is/was even a folder on it titled "Baby Cinco", the name we called you before you were born. I had started going through each folder and saving the pictures I wanted for your scrapbook in that folder. Belly pictures, getting your room ready, the day you were born, all your monthly photos, they were all in that folder, ready for me to send them off for printing. I just hadn't printed them yet.
Then daddy went to look for a couple of pictures to print my blog for me like he does every year. Can you guess? The hard drive wouldn't work. The computer didn't seem to believe it existed and then even when it would show up on the screen the hard drive would whir and nothing else would happen. Daddy has tried everything he can think of - and he is good with computers. He's asked another friend who is also good to no avail. Daddy's next plan of action is to send it in to someone with recovery experience. While daddy is still hopeful, there is a very real possibility those photos of you are lost to us. Sort of.
There is still our Stein Family blog I keep. It doesn't have everything, but it has a great deal of it. Before you get old enough to point it out to me let me just tell you, yes, I know I could take those pictures from my blog and print them. The problem is after I edit the photos I half-size them for the blog so they upload faster and don't take up as much memory on Picasa where they are stored. Yes, I could print those but the quality would be lost and I, frankly, have become a spoiled photo snob. I want the best. I want sharp. I want clear. Especially for you, sweet boy.
So it comes down to this. I think this is the option I can live with. It's not the same as having a photograph in hand but I can take the pictures from Picasa and put them in this blog for you without future lessening their quality. I can tell you your story and daddy will help me publish it in a sturdy book for you. It isn't the same. It's reading from a Nook or Kindle. The story is there but you miss the feel and smell of the pages, the sound of the paper rustling as you turn the next page. Not the same. Different. Not as good, but maybe, maybe okay.
Without further ado, here is the story of our first year together.
We love you Samuel.
Mom
