Babies, Brother's, and a Blog Tragedy

In case you haven't noticed, there are a whole bunch of random grey boxes with minus signs in them all over my blog. Especially once you get to the posts that are older than Christmas. Why???

A blog tragedy.

Last night I was looking at the gallery on my Android phone and saw that an album titled "One + one = 3" was taking up 694 photos of "space" on my phone. So I thought, I need some more storage space since I'm nearly out, why don't I delete that album?

What I didn't know: That album was in fact a collection of EVERY SINGLE photo I have ever posted onto my blog in the past 6 years. That album was also NOT really on my phone taking up space. It was actually showing up by way of being connected through Google+ and was merely "floating" there via Picassa Web Albums.

What I really did not know: When I proceeded to delete that entire album via my PHONE, it actually deleted the entire album from Picassa Web Albums, which meant it deleted the album completely. Gone. Poof. Deleted.

The Consequences: Hours of time spent adding photos to blog posts in the past 6 years are gone. I have every post I've written, with words, but absolutely no photos. Nearly 700 pictures. Gone.

Needless to say, when I realized what had happened, I was devastated. Heartbroken. Crushed. In complete shock. A little research and a desperate email to my brother in law confirmed the awful: the album of pictures is non-recoverable and the delete was permanent.

The "Good" News: Fortunately while the album was deleted, most of the original pictures are safe and located somewhere between our desktop and two hard drives. So, we didn't completely lose the pictures, we just lost them off the blog. Now all we can do is put in hours and hours of work locating what we think are the appropriate pictures to match the blog posts in an effort to repair as much damage as possible. As soon as that is done, I will be printing off as much as I can into Blog Books. Something I have been wanting to do for years, never did, and now highly regret.

My Advice?: If you have Google+ and use an adroid device (I don't know if iphones have the same problem?), don't ever, ever, delete an album in your gallery from your phone to try and save space. The only prompt I received was "confirm deletions?" and once I said yes, there was no way to cancel or back out once it started deleting. I think that Google+, Andriod, Blogger, and Picassa Web Albums have a serious problem by allowing something like this to happen so easily without any warning or knowledge. I honestly had absolutely no idea what I was doing until it was permanent. I also know that others have had the same problem. Which means you think they would fix it and make it more difficult to have happen and/or make a way to recover the album.

Please don't let this happen to you!

Now, on to Babies and Brother's. 

Bubs was in a particularly delightful mood this morning, which was a tremendous blessing considering the night before and the severe lack of sleep I received. During breakfast he suddenly piped up, out of nowhere with no prompt: "I gonna have a brother! A baby brother! I find my brother." He lifted up his shirt, pointed to his belly and then decided he needed to actually go find his brother in the toy room.

He left and was back a minute later with a little stuffed turtle, announcing that it was his brother. He then proceeded to hold his brother, feed his brother eggs and toast, and say he needed to give his brother "cool hair." We went to the bathroom where he combed the top of the turtle's head and then applied some hair gel before saying "Cool hair! Don't touch it!" and returning to the table. After breakfast he said he wanted to watch Curious George with his brother, so we did.

I couldn't believe it. It was seriously the cutest thing I've seen in a long time. He obviously has the baby on his mind and is somewhat realizing he will have a brother. I am sure he has no idea what that actually means, but the fact that he is thinking about it is pretty impressive. I wish I had a video camera rolling the entire conversation, but I was only able to get bits and pieces and a cute picture.

Blake and his "brother"