July, she will Fly

(Bonus points for anyone who knows what song the title of this post is drawn from!)

So I spent the bulk of last July scanning the bulk of my parents 9, count them NINE, photo albums.  They've been married 50 years now, so the photos ranged from the early 1960s up to, well, when we all switched over to digital!  I'd say the last 5 years.

It was a fun project, but absolute exhausting.  I would spend 4-5 hours every day, 5-6 days a week just scanning.  And then I started to pick out my favorites and import them into the program I used for the slideshow.  It was much harder than I had originally anticipated because there were just SO many cool stories I could tell with these pictures.  I kept threatening my parents and Sisters with a slideshow just of all of our bad HAIR.

But there would have been a disproportionate number of pictures of my sister and I, and since we're AWESOME, that just didn't seem fair.  And so the Hair Slideshow remains unmade.  (I might still put it together and hold it over her head when I really need a favor...)

After the first couple of weeks, I started to get depressed.  I thought perhaps it was over-marinating in the past, and so I took a weekend off and just spent time in the present with my babies.  It was restorative, but when I had to go back to it, I still felt sad.

After the reunion, and the Slideshow Premier (I have no idea what to call it when you finally show it to your peeps), my Mom called me.  She and Dad had been watching it all over again and she asked me why she felt so sad watching it.  I started to tear up and said how odd it was because I had cried off and on the whole time I was making it and I couldn't figure out why at the time.  After showing it to everyone and talking to Chris and thinking about it, I think I realized what it was.

We can't hold time in our hands.  We can't pause, we can't rewind, we can't slow anything down.  It keeps passing, our children keep growing, we keep growing older, and time passes like the water of a river, flowing, every flowing down to the sea.

We were all so young.  Not just my parents, ALL of us.  And I'm not sure there was ever a time when life was Easy.  But for some reason, all that looking back made me horribly sentimental for my own children's childhood.  I can't go back and be young again.  (And believe me, looking back at the pictures of my own adolescence, I have NO desire to) But I want to do a better job at enjoying my own children's youth.  And maybe through them, I can find my own sense of wonder again.

Some days they're children and some days they're Jedi Knights.