Photos for a timeline

There will be no photos in this post despite the title.

Havoc came home with a school project. It is related to their current social studies segment somehow that was never adequately explained. They have to do a time line of their lives.

All 6-7 years of it

What came home was a couple pieces of construction paper glued together with numbers running along the bottom. The child is supposed to, with parental help, mark milestones or events for each year, they want you to use photos. Parent helps arrange the photos & labels & the child decorates it.

Havoc says “Do we have some photos of me to use?”

Oh little boy. Are they so prevalent they are background decor in your life now? Have the numerous photo albums, the hardbound book of your play last year and the non stop photo slide show screen saver on my computer become the same as the legos on the floor? Just things you don’t notice?

I say “Havoc. Mommy has over 10,000 photos that she knows of and that doesn't include the last 5 months.”

“You have 10,000 photos of me?”

“Of you and your brother mostly, but a couple thousand are of things like toys and the house and vacations.”

Havoc goes off to inform Mayhem that Mama has “Ten thousand photos of ME, Mayhem”, which of course sends Mayhem to me wondering “You have 10 fousand pichers of me?”

We looked at the folders of photos on my laptop. Mayhem did not mind that his brother had 15 folders all to himself, while he did not. Until Havoc started bragging on how he has more photos than Mayhem. I had to explain to Mayhem that 10 years from now Havoc would move out & go to college and Mayhem would still be here. Then there would be folders of just Mayhem photos. This seemed to satisfy him and he went back to playing Lego Batman while Havoc and I sorted out timeline photos.

OMG! I have so many photos! I am so not lying when I say over 10,000 and geez can we say ‘excessive’? Havoc had about 20 photos picked out before we finished years 0 & 1 and there was no room. 4 photos a year was pretty much the max. It took us over an hour to choose 30 photos for 8 columns. Every column has a birthday photo, a vacation photo, a Christmas related photo and either a 1st day of school or Ren Fair photo. I had to start skipping folders and just going right to the month with the event because Havoc wanted to look at and discuss every single thing in every photo. Which is sweet and fun to do for about 45 minutes. But after and hour and beginning each time with “how old was I in this photo” which when you are looking at things chronologically and are still looking at pictures in the May2005 folder, gets really really annoying.

It’s a cute timeline. We glued in the pictures I printed & Havoc drew in the columns around them images he remembered from the photos we weren’t able to fit. He took it in today.

I wish I had taken a picture of it.