– hormones
– no AM workout (it was a planned rest day, so no run or barre this AM. I swear my brain chemistry just gets some sort of very real boost from a workout. And at this very moment, I can tell it is missing.)
– frustration over discipline issues with A again. Agh. The yelling (yeah, I thought I’d never be that mom — and now I am. #(*&#@!) and nightly timeouts are not working, nor am I even able to enforce them. I need to move on to some new tactics.
– work. I love my job (I really do!) but this has been a rough week. Also, I get really annoyed (sorry) when patients are late (like >30 minutes), especially time-consuming ones. I then have to ‘fit them in’ which means throwing everyone else off, including the subsequent patients.
Anyway. All of this has translated into a horribly unfocused and rather unpleasant day. Maybe tonight will be better. At least I’ve stayed off of my phone!
What I originally set out to write about was photo organizing and video archiving. I came to the grand conclusion this morning that I DO NOT CARE about maintaining some elaborate digital photo archive. I am completely content with — gasp — printed paper albums. I finally started putting together 2014, and will continue to make a shutterfly (or similar) book a year until I’m too old to have memories to photograph (ie hopefully a long time).
Our method of culling the yearly photos is to post all of the good ones (225 of them in 2014) to a shared photostream, and then I just upload those to shutterfly and make a book. DONE AND DONE. No giant libraries or complicated archiving to contend with, and no worrying about paper becoming obsolete.
VIDEOS however are a different story. If I could put them on paper, I would! Making DVDs is not the answer because i have heard that they can degrade with time, plus it’s 2015 and we already only own one DVD drive in the house (on my Mac), so who knows what 2040 will bring?
Soooo, I think that videos need to go online. Josh was thinking YouTube makes the most sense, but that seems a little public, especially as the kids get older (although maybe they have a private setting?). I found this recently published cnet article useful, and I am leaning towards just using Google. (I just don’t see that company disappearing, though you never know!).
How do you store your videos? Do you meticulously archive your online photos? Will you, too, be partaking in a much-needed glass of wine tonight?
10 Comments
Have you read "Peaceful Parent, Happy Child" by Dr. Laura Markham? HIGHLY recommend it for your frustrating issues with A! I tell all my parent friends about it, it was a complete paradigm shift for me but her methods are very effective, especially if you have a child for which time-outs are not effective *raises hand*.
No answers for the photo/video thing. We just have ours on our computers, backed up. I need to do the photobooks (I’m 6 years behind) but all the pictures except the ones from my phone, are on my husband’s computer, uploaded to lightroom which I don’t know how to navigate. I wish he’d just upload them to iphoto, but NO, he wanted to edit them, which he’ll never do. (its a point of contention).
I get you on the annoyances. I really like "how to talk so kids will listen…" its geared for older kids, but some of it works for 3 year olds. Patients being late annoys me, too, esp. if 30-60 minutes (or more!) and then everything is off! No wine tonight, I’m doing wine-free M-Th (week 1, almost complete!). The best part is actually having that glass of wine to look forward to tomorrow!
I take our good photos each month and dump them into a Picasa/Google+ album. I also make I Shutterfly photobook per year. I try to do update the photobook monthly with that months new photos but I am hit or miss about keeping up with that.
I rececntly discovered your blog when looking for Triangle resturant recommendations (you have some great ones)! I work at that other blue university 🙂
I feeel like little kids and effective discipline can be a long road. Finding what works and then sticking it out in all of the moments of defiance. I have never found a be all end all book on the subject (for me). In our house it has mostly been sticking to my stance until my kids realized that they will never outlast Mommy. Also rountines really help us. I think this is one of those areas that where it depends a lot on the personality of both the child and the parents. Best of luck finding what works for your family.
Add me to the frustrated parent of a three-year-old club! Between trying to figure out discipline issues and dealing with the fear of public restrooms, parenting is making me a little insane right now. And I just have one child to focus on, plus I get to hand off the difficult bedtime battles to my husband more often than I think you get to. (Right now, anyway. Hopefully we’ll turn a corner on this before tax season.)
I have been trying to figure out the video thing, too. I’ve been trying out uploading stuff to Vimeo as private videos because a friend said that’s what she does, in addition to everything being backed up on our home server plus another cloud storage service, but I don’t love the interface (at least from the phone app). I may give Youtube a try and see if I like it better. I wish there was something as future-proof for video as paper/books are for photos, though.
For photos, my husband and I both back up from our own cameras and computers to a shared server on our home network and then I semi-regularly upload the best/meaningful ones to an album for the year on Shutterfly. (Either the ones that I want to have available to choose from when putting together an annual photo book or ones that for whatever reason I don’t want to print but don’t want to totally lose either.) So, similar to what you do, it sounds like.
Recommendation: Janet Landsbury and her parenting techniques. She has two books and a great community on Facebook. Very supportive. Though I know you’re recently off FB 😉
My husband is in charge of the photos, and he is great at it, so I am happy to delegate it to him. I do think YouTube has a way to post privately, but I confess that is above my pay grade.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the idea on how to organize a yealy photo album! You made my day.
*yearly
I quite like 1-2-3 Magic by Thomas Phelan. It works very well with my spirited 5 year old (and is also the method they use at her school so it’s consistent across home/school. I don’t use time outs much, she responds better to consequences (e.g. Going to 3 means no TV after dinner)
thank you. this information very nice to me
wish you success