Sauder Village

We spent the morning in Archbold, Ohio today visiting Sauder Village and checking out farm life as it was a century ago.  I think I was in junior high the last time I visited this place.  The day was gorgeous and we happily wandered around watching the period-dressed folks spinning wool into yarn, pressing apple juice, drying fruit, woodworking, milking cows & collecting chicken eggs, etc.

Our little map-reader and tour guide directed us from place to place.

Grandma Verna uses this very thing for making homemade applesauce.  In fact, Sophie and her preschool friends just did this with Grandma at school in preparation for their Thanksgiving feast in a little over a month.  They peeled, cut, cooked and pressed the apples into sauce, to be frozen until feast day!

Cracking up and Will being daddy's little shadow with map tucked into back pocket.  ;)

A straw maze was set up inside one of the barns.  Both kids LOVED it.

Craig trying out the various methods of cabinet making on display.

We washed hands in the restroom and Sophie got the biggest kick out of this unusual hand dryer.  We packed lunch for this trip and ate in the car before heading home.

Devastated

A terrible thing happened recently and I am beyond devastated about it.  The back story is long and ridiculous, but in short:  I needed to change my accounts with Google/gmail to rearrange the listed "administrators" on my little blog here.  The new account was created, the blog transferred and the old account deleted... before realizing (because I am a complete idiot) that all of the photos stored on my blog, were actually stored on Picasa, a Google product that I didn't bother to transfer before deleting the old account.  So while the blog itself still exists, every single photo posted after January of 2010 (when I switched from Photobucket to just uploading through Blogger to Picasa)... is gone.  Google has ZERO live technical support available and we (Craig and I) have tried everything we can possibly think of to resolve it.  Google's help page that is used for restoring deleted accounts gives a message of "internal error" every time we follow the steps/prompts for restoring.  We have tried reading and posting in online forums for help, called multiple phone numbers that Google has posted (no one actually talks to you though) and contacted various friends with more computer knowledge/connections than we have.  It's feeling hopeless.  After 30 days, accounts are supposedly unrecoverable and it has been 20 so far.  I have been in denial and cried about it.  Sorta' feels like a part of my life has been erased.  I still have all the pictures on hard drive.  But this has been my online scrapbook/journal for the past five years and I have put SO MANY HOURS of my time into this, forfeiting sleep on tons of nights just to document the story of us.  I don't know what to do now.  I still plan to keep blogging but I feel like I should go back and re-do some of the most important memories:  birthdays, important milestones, holidays, etc.  Otherwise, it's just 3 1/2 years of writing - some of which will not make sense without a picture attached.  What would you do?  And do you by any chance have any solutions we haven't thought of?

So very sad...

Daddies Are the Best

Aren't they??