Sad

Audrey has been waiting all year for her turn to be the spotlight student at school, and this is finally her week!  She is supposed to take a picture of herself as a baby in to her class, and all week the other kids try to guess who it is, and then at the end of the week, Mom goes into the class and tells all about the kid and brings treats.


We have some adorable 8x10's of Audrey as a baby.  There is one my mom took of her at 3 months, that we had enlarged and hung up on the wall because it was so cute.  There are a couple kiddie kandids of her at 6 months, one in a lacy blue dress, and another one that is a nudie shot.  And we have her one year picture, in her first St. Patrick's Day dress.

AND GUESS WHO CAN'T FIND ANY OF THOSE PICTURES?

I was sure I knew where they all were.  They were in a big binder full of  our favorite pictures in the living room.

Wrong.

Okay, so they were in the box under my bed with all the other pictures.

Nope.

So they must be downstairs in the box that is holding those framed family shots,  still waiting to find a wall to hang on, when and if our downstairs family room ever has actual walls.

Not there either.

I have torn the house apart and searched everywhere looking for them.  Not just Audrey's pictures are missing.  There are a lot of pictures missing.  You know how when you buy a package of pictures that comes with eleven million different sizes and poses that you never find a use for, and they tend to pile up somewhere?  ALL of those are gone, not just Audrey's but some of the other kids too.  Lots of baby pictures of all the kids are missing.   And it is ironic that Audrey is the only kid I needed a picture for, and also the only kid of whom I could not find even one picture.   We finally pulled a snapshot out of one of our scrapbooks.  Not the picture I wanted to send with her, but the best we could do.

I'm starting to get sick thinking about where in the world they might have got to.  I have seen them in this house, so I know they made the move with us.  In fact, I am 95 % certain that all of the missing pictures are in a binder somewhere, because I have a pretty distinct memory of going through an organizing fit one day last fall, and rounding up a bunch of loose pictures and putting them in page protectors and into a binder so they would be safe.  I am worried that in the chaos of our flood last September, when we were cleaning everything out, that they accidentally got put in the wrong box and thrown away.

I HATE finding out that things are not where I thought they were.  WHY is it always what you need that you can't find?   In my desperate quest for pictures, I have discovered so much clutter that we have squirreled away into boxes and closets and drawers that nobody cares about and will never need or want.   Why is it that I can lay my  hands on all of that crap, but not what I really want?