Summer Birthdays

We celebrated JD's birthday a little late this year and had a combined party for him and Annabeth in August. We also ended up having a few friends as guests (which we don't normally do) and it was a lot of fun! The kids had a great time playing with their friends, swimming, and eating.

Annabeth has been asking for a playhouse for a long time. I couldn't find one used anywhere. When I saw this one on an Amazon Lightning deal I jumped on it. She didn't quite understand what it was when it was still in the box, but she loved it after Jerry and Justus put it together for her the next day!

 JD got a bike for his big birthday gift from us, but in all the craziness I didn't even snap one photo!

Annabeth's School Picture

When I took back to (home)school photos a few weeks ago, I didn't get a photo of Annabeth. I took a few shots of her on her birthday instead. She is an official student this year, working on some pre-school workbooks with me each day.

Keepers New Year

We celebrated the end of our first year (and beginning of our second) with our Keepers of the Faith Club at church this week. We have done a lot of fun things this year: fire safety, archery,  nursing home visits, and tie dye to name a few. Jerry and I are the group leaders and we think it was a very successful year. You can see some posts of our fun activities here. We are looking forward to new adventures.

Here is a photo of our group:

Bathtime Baby

Well, she's not really a baby anymore... but here is Annabeth after a bath tonight!

Getting My (Digital Photo) Life in Order

I took a little time this summer to try and get my digital photos organized and backed up. Just in case someone else will find this helpful I thought I would share what I have done so far and what I plan to do to finish this project. My film photos are organized in albums - this post is not about those. Someday I would like to digitize them, but that will probably have to wait several years.

I wanted to do two things: back up everything and print. I am completely done with backing up and will continue working on printing. 

My Old System

A few years ago, I didn't really worry much about backing up my photos. I trusted my iMac completely. I didn't take human error (my own!) into account. Right before we moved from Wisconsin to Arizona I nearly deleted every digital photo I've ever taken.  Since then I have been extra careful about having photos backed up in more than one location.

I had my photos on two computers (iMacs) and automatically backed up the photos using Time Machine and an external hard drives. I also uploaded the best of the best photos to Shutterfly as free off-site or cloud backup to my local backup. 

Backing Up: The New Way

Last year, I decided to try Shutterfly's cloud storage service called ThisLife. I love it! It automatically backs up all the photos I load to my computer (phone and iPad too). 

ThisLife saves every photo (and video!) in my entire photo library. Unlike regular Shutterfly, I can download a full resolution photo if I need a copy for some reason. The photos are easy to look at online or with an app for mobile devices. When I signed up last year, ThisLife cost $59 for one year and I was limited to 25,000 photos and videos. I had around 13,000 photos so I knew I would be okay for awhile. Since then they have changed their storage plans and you can now get UNLIMITED photo storage for $19.99 a year. That's a great deal!!

ThisLife

I was happy with ThisLife. Then I updated my iMac and got an iPhone and wanted to give iCloud a try. Apple's iCloud does all the things ThisLife does and more. I used it to sync all my photos to two iMacs, my iPhone, and my iPad. Uploading took f.o.r.e.v.e.r and killed my internet speed for weeks. (ThisLife gives you more control over uploading and was much better in that regard.)  iCloud is a little more expensive - $3.99 per month for only 200GB of storage - and will only work for you if you are an Apple person. ThisLife will work with other operating systems.

Apple iCloud Photos

So right now I have all my photos in two clouds. You can see from the screen shots above, they are very similar. I haven't decided yet if I will keep both. I actually like ThisLife a bit better, but if I had to choose I would keep iCloud because it just works so well with all my Apple devices.

So to recap, back up your photos! Experts recommend two local and one cloud backup:

1. Local #1 - Computer
2. Local #2 - External hard drive
3. Cloud - ThisLife, iCloud, Amazon, Google, Dropbox, etc.

Printing

The second part of my plan was getting these photos where we can see them. It just isn't the same to sit around the computer screen and look at photos together. Looking at them on the iPad is a bit better, but not much. I decided against printing actual photos and putting them in albums. Instead, I have chosen to make photos books. They hold a lot more photos in much smaller space. They are also easier for the kids to handle - no ripped binder holes or photos falling out.

I have been taking digital photos since 2002. In 2002 and 2003, I still took most of my photos with a regular camera and just a few with the digital camera. Since those years had very few digital photos I made two 20 page Shutterfly photo books for them. 

From 2004 on I plan to make and order Blurb photo books. This is the company I use to print my blog books and I have been very pleased with them. The advantage to Blurb is you can fit a LOT more photos in one book. Blurb books can be over 200 pages while Shutterfly is limited in that regard. For larger books with lots of photos, Blurb ends up being less expensive.

Since ThisLife is connected to Shutterfly I can easily order a DVD of my photos and put it in the back of the photo book. That way if the "clouds" ever evaporate we will have the photos on our computer, an external drive, in photo books, and on disks.

The plan for printing:

1. Shutterfly books - for special events or smaller amounts of photos
2. Blurb books - for yearly albums with LOTS of photos (and blog books)
3. Photo DVD - to put in back of each book

So, here's where I'm at...

I have all my digital photos backed up to ThisLife and iCloud. I never have to think about this again. Each photo I take will be uploaded automatically. I have DVDs for 2002, 2003, and 2013. I plan to order disks for the remaining (and future) years. I'll wait for Shutterfly sales to do this. (In case you're wondering why I don't burn the disks myself - Shutterfly can get a lot more photos on a disk than I can.)

I have photos books for 2002, 2003, and 2013. I did the 2013 book out of order because I wanted to use a later year with LOTS of photos as a prototype for the Blurb photo book. I actually have a lot of the photos in the blog books for 2007-2011 so I didn't want to do one of those years. I haven't decided  if I will make blog books AND photo books for the same years. I am thinking I will because I don't blog every photo I take and overkill is better than not enough.

Speaking of the blog, every photo I post here is also saved on Google storage. I pay $1.99 per month for that. It is my least favorite photo storage. It is a mess and not organized at all. Every time I try and organize it I get messages saying moving the photos will remove it from my blog so I just leave it a mess. I had to start paying that fee a few years ago or start a new blog. I consider it a blog fee more than a photo storage fee.

Whew! Long post! So, I'm curious... how to you back up and/or print your photos? Have you ever lost photos? Are you concerned about the safety of cloud storage? 

Back to (Home)School Pictures 2015

We started our ninth official year of homeschooling this week. We always take a minute to take photos during our first week of school. Each year we fill out a memory book page* about the kids and glue these photos to the page.

Here are the photos of the boys for this year:

Hope those made you laugh as much as they did me! As you can see we had some technical difficulties. Even though we were in the shade, everyone insisted it was too bright. I had to take multiple photos of everyone to get one good shot. I never did get a good one of Eli. After working with the boys, I didn't even try with Annabeth yet. I will get hers and a good one of Eli soon. Meanwhile, here is one of everyone else:

*If you would like to print a pdf of the first day of school page I created, you can click here.

Double Storm

We got hit with two monsoon storms yesterday. One mid-morning and one in the late evening. Both started with some blowing dust and strong winds and ended with rain. The evening storm included TONS of lightning.

The morning storm dumped a good bit of much needed rain!

During the evening storm I tried to catch a few photos of the lightning. Boy, it is hard to photograph lightning! This is what I ended up with...

In the bottom photo, I accidentally timed it so the lightning made it look like it was daytime instead of pitch black night. If you look really close you can see one of the patio chairs overturned by the guest house front porch.

In the neighborhood just north of us, there were tons of trees taken down by the storm. Thankfully, we didn't have any damage. We have a had a pretty boring monsoon season this year so we were happy to have two storms (with rain!) in one day. The weather here can get pretty boring... sunny and hot, repeat... so different weather of any kind is welcomed by all of us!

Library Freebies!

Wesley got a nice surprise when we went to the library a couple weeks ago. In addition to his free book and a coupon for free food, he won not one but TWO of the random prize drawings. He won a Captain America t-shirt and a $15 iTunes gift card. We didn't see the notifications on the library website so were totally weren't expecting it!

Everyone except Jerry participated in the summer reading program this year. Wesley was the only one who won extra prizes. Too bad because some of the prizes were really nice - iPads, GoPro, etc. We all got a free book and coupons for free lunch at Chipotle.

We used our Chipotle coupons for a free lunch on Saturday. We just had to pay for Jerry's lunch and three drinks. It took the poor cashier forever to ring us up. Thankfully, we beat the rush by a few minutes and I don't think it upset too many people.

None of the kids had ever had Chipotle before. Some liked it better than others. We had a good time and you can't beat the price!

A Lost Classic

I've been purging and organizing in preparation for the new school year. This morning, I came across this "book" I wrote several years ago. I'm guessing it was made in 2008. 

In years past, I made things like this all the time. I can tell by the quality I made it on a whim. We probably all sat down to color together and this is what I made. As kids get older we do less and less things like this. It reminds me of a different phase when we had lots of little kids and only one big. Now we have lots of big kids and only one little. 

All the kids loved seeing it! Wesley suggested I make a new version. I just might do that!

Note: Eli called shorts "up jeans" at one time. He insisted on wearing them every day. 

Room Shuffle

We decided to do a little room shuffling this summer. Eli, Justus, and JD stayed put. Hayden and Wesley moved into what was Annabeth's room. Annabeth moved into the former school room. The biggest task was moving all the school items and books into the living room. As long as we were moving all the school stuff out to the main living area we thought we'd move the computers out there as well. Previously, they had been in our bedroom.

I spent a lot of time looking at bookshelf ideas online. Thankfully, we have an Ikea relatively close so we knew we could get decent bookcases there inexpensively. I finally came up with a plan including an "Ikea hack" to build two small desks into the shelves. The hardest part was deciding what color bookcases to buy. In the end with went with white. I really liked the look of wood grain, but Ikea's version was quite dark and I knew it would show dust and really darken the room. Our living room doesn't have much natural light so in the end the white seemed like a better idea.

Here are a few before photos:

We made the trip to Ikea and bought seven white Billy bookcases. We decided to put doors on two of them to hide some of the less attractive school items. We also got a table that we would end up cutting in half to make the two desks.

I removed all the books from the shelves. I got rid of a few, but most were just set to the side to await the construction of their new home.

Jerry spent several hours over several days assembling. I put one together myself, but made a mistake and was demoted to assistant. They were pretty easy to put together and when you do so many in a row you kind of get it down after a couple.

Once the shelves were done, we got to work on the desks. We didn't put any of the books in place just in case we had second thoughts. The desks were pretty simple, basically just an Ikea table cut in half. We did reinforce the shelf they rest on with some L brackets and screw the table into place. In order to get the computers plugged in we did have to cut/drill a few holes.

It was looking good and the desks worked out great so we started putting the books into place.

We had books all over the house that are now housed together. We still need to figure out something for the top, it's a little plain right now, but overall we are really happy with how it turned out. 

It is nice to have the computers out of our room. Now if someone is on the computer they aren't hidden away from the rest of the family. We'll see how it goes doing school at the kitchen table. We've never really done that before!