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In honor of Emmy night, I'll just step forward and accept the award for Most Inconsistent Writer in the category of Mommy Bloggers. I can't promise that this isn't the only time I'll post here before Christmas. Yes, the double negative hurts my long-buried writer's brain but I'm out of practice.

Yesterday I updated my phone to iOS6 (new emojis! pretty maps! i can finally keep matilda in her extremely educational toddler apps using guided access! there i go, pushing my phone to the very limits of its capabilities...) and when my phone restarted all my photos were gone. I had not backed up my photos because my Apple expert in residence had already updated his phone without any photo issues. 

To say that I freaked out would be an understatement.

We don't use our big fancy camera that often and the vast majority of our pictures are on my phone, which hadn't been backed up since the beginning of the summer (i know...) so naturally I lost my mind thinking that I had failed the Number One Rule of Parenting Your First Child: Overdocumentation of Their Every Move.

But...it turns out that when you have two thousand, six hundred and forty something (2,64something) photos on your poor iPhone 4, it takes awhile to restore them. In the time that it took for the pictures to reload appropriately, Matilda watched me quietly and then started doing this thing where she covered her mouth with both her hands, and laughed maniacally until her entire upper body was shaking. Watching how quickly she launched into this dead-on impression of me (other than confusing my anguish for hilarity, which was in itself hilarious) shocked me into pulling myself together.

Besides resolving to maybe not cry like a hyena in front of my toddler again, I also decided I would (re)start writing. I take a lot of phone photos and I have an index card on our fridge where I write down Matilda's new words but I think I could stand to throw some stories on here once or twice a month. My emotions about the documentation of our family life apparently boil closer to the surface than I realized.

I would have been devastated to lose all the pictures that I clearly need to keep around for Matilda's preschool applications. All caught up on current events? Check. Back on our game.