small miracles.

I am fairly certain that a miracle happened to me last night. Probably a miracle that has a perfectly logical explanation, but I am purposely choosing to believe that it is a miracle--a divine answering of prayer-- so if you know what the logical explanation IS, please don't tell me. Last winter, one of our laptops fried. Totally crashed. And with it went an entire year of baby pictures that hadn't been uploaded anywhere else. Months before this had happened, we'd transfered all of these pictures from our old, caveman-like desktop TO the "more reliable" laptop, thinking that they would be safer there until we chose to print them or something. Except, they weren't. They were gone. I had frantically searched the old machine, hoping to find them somewhere else. Hoping that I hadn't really deleted them completely. But I had. At least as far as I and my more- technologically-inclined husband could tell. They were gone. I kept it in the back of my mind that maybe there was a possibility of recovering some of the documents from our laptop somehow. Maybe we could have someone look at it. And mostly, I tried not to think about it. It was one of those things that crept into your mind in the middle of the night: What if I never see those pictures again? Sure, they're only pictures. But I think any woman who has ever had a baby knows that they're more than "only pictures". I sent up frequent, quiet prayers that those pictures wouldn't really be lost--they meant so much to me. Anyway, a couple of days ago, the caveman desktop had been turned on (By whom? Still a mystery. I'm guessing someone under the age of 4). I noticed the screen looking all weird and distorted and figured the machine was probably on it's last leg, turned it off, and didn't think about it again until yesterday. Anyway, when I booted it up yesterday, I dragged the mouse through the start menu, accidentally pausing long enough over "My Pictures" to notice a bunch of OLD photos pulling up--notably, December 2006-June 2007 (Ambrose's baby pictures). And they're all there! I mean, there's a handful of photos that were directly put on the laptop that I don't have, but I'm perfectly THRILLED to see these again. Well. That took more space than I'd expected it to. I had intended to talk about some hopes and intentions for Lent this year in this post, but I think I'll save it for tomorrow. On the agenda for the rest of the day? Headed to visit my new midwife, followed hopefully by a trip to McDonald's for a 3-year-old who successfully used the potty today.