Finally....

Kevin and I made a big leap and decision within the past month or two. We decided to get a new computer, or rather a new laptop.

Our home computer was one that my parents bought me before my sophomore year in college, so it's safe to say that the computer was going on ten years old. That's kind of old for a computer. Every time we would pull our computer up, we would hope that it wouldn't give us the infamous error message of having no memory, therefore, not allowing us to perform any real actions on it. When we went on the Internet, we hoped it would let us do what we wanted. And, the real challenge was being able to have a large amount of patience as we waited for any program to upload. We were both used to our work computers, so when the computer would run a little (or actually a lot slower), we would try and do things too fast - oh wait, that was just me. I think our computer knew when I was going to use it and got real mad and didn't want any part of it, so it responded with error messages, or simply just freezing up. But, don't get me wrong here, this computer has seen me through all of my college term papers, hundreds of newspaper articles - basically all of my college work was on here. When Brooklyn was born, it became the home base for over 1,400 pictures from her life before she even turned one. So, it's really been faithful to us, but as happens with all old things, sometimes they slow down, and sometimes they die.

In our case, our computer had slowed down. That was until we brought the laptop home with us, and then, sniffing out the new laptop, our computer died. This happened, of course, when we were trying to download all of our 1,400 plus pictures off the computer and onto a flash drive. Our computer didn't like that we were trying to take things away from her, so her best defense was to die. We could only open her in Safe Mode, meaning there was no way to get the photos off. After we both made several attempts to revive her, finding it was useless, I called several computer repair shops and got a deal on bringing our computer in to get files off of it. But, when Kevin came home that night, he gave it one last stab to see he could get it to work. When the screen came up, there was the word "force" there, and he choose that option. So, slowly, we loaded the pictures onto our camera's memory card, and then on the laptop. After a couple nights of doing this, we were finally finished.

We were totally wrong to have the pictures all stored on the computer, and now that we realize that, we are going to be burning CDs with the photos. But, they really did have to go somewhere, and we don't like to get all of our photos printed right away. Let me tell you, it was wonderful to look at all the pictures from the past two years to see how much our princess has changed. She has really grown up. We really had no clue that she had such little hair toward her sixth and seventh months, and had such a chubby face, and chubby legs with rolls. I guess when you are in the midst of living life with your baby, you don't necessarily notice all the changes that you can see by the captured photo. Having got these pictures off our dying computer meant so much to us. I would be very, very sad if we couldn't have gotten them off.

Anyway, back to our laptop...

We also made the decision to go from dial-up service to high-speed internet. I know, as Kevin's brother would say, we were living in the dark ages. Even my parents have high-speed internet! So, today, we got our high-speed internet installed, and it's wonderful. So quick and smooth from one website to another, and we don't have to wait for a ten minutes for a page to load. Yea! To initiate the high-speed internet, I went on to YouTube with Brooklyn and found a song she likes from the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. I think we made a wise decision, and it seems like everyone will get something out of the decision that took us almost three years to make. That is everyone, but the dog.