19 years of 'Brady pictures' overload

Brady's graduation party is quickly approaching & Lora had asked me if I had any pictures of Brady to include in a display at his graduation party.  Of course I'm a child of the digital age & most of my pics were on my external hard drive.  I did have SOME actual photographs that you could feel & touch so I got those together for her to see if she wanted to use them.  I also put the digital pics I had on a thumb drive for her to print out.  She also had pictures on a thumb drive so when we combined them we had a nice little array of photos... 180 to be exact (but who's counting?)

Lora had a lot going on to prepare for the party so I told her I would take care of the pictures if it would help her.   I uploaded 180 pictures to Snapfish & had them printed at Walgreens.  I asked her if I could put the awesome picture I took pic of him w/ his diploma right after walking off stage in an 8x10 to put in a frame on the table.  I started w/ the 180 pictures that I had printed & the small stack of photos I had...

 I had asked Lora how she wanted them placed in the album...chronologically or just random?  (I was hoping & praying she would say, 'oh- just random...')  Sadly she wanted them chronologically so I had a big job ahead of me... As I started to sort them out, it was much harder than I thought it would be.  I mean - God bless the actual photos that had dates pre-printed on them. (Ah, the good 'ole days.)  I started by making a list of important dates to help me narrow down when a pic may have happened & to help me gauge what year it might have been based on how old someone looked.    (And yes, he went to pre-school for 2 years...)

I made a few date markers & started by kind of throwing all the pictures that I thought were in a certain time frame together.  That wasn't working very well for me & I got frustrated pretty quickly the first night & decided to wait until the next day to work on them.

Lora brought me around 75-100 actual pictures she had the next day so I had to add those to my collection.  There was this one of B-rad & Brady when he was itty bitty on a tractor.  Couldn't you just DIE?

I knew that I had to get my shit together & change up my sorting process because what I was doing was NOT working.  I made a paper for each year from 1996-2015.  I put all those papers in a row on my table & I started putting pictures that I was for SURE happened at a certain time in the appropriate piles.  (Like I knew I got married in 1999 & Brady was in my wedding...that pic went in the 99 pile...)  I also worked backwards on some pics because I'm able to remember 2014 easier than 2001.  The ones I had NO idea about went in another pile.  Most of my digital pics were labelled by date & sorted in folders on my hard drive (DUH.) so I would run back & forth to my computer (Wouldn't it have been so much easier if my stupid MacBook was here & I could've had it on the table w/ me?  Sigh..) to write dates on the back so I could put them in the right pile.  There were many pics that I would say, "WOW - that happened in 2010?  It doesn't seem like that long ago!" 

I got lucky on some of the actual pics Lora had given me like this one...

 I guess Brady liked it because he had written his name & date on the back....  

He got the dirt bike for his birthday which is Aug 27.  He was 8 years old.

So I had a stack of pictures that I had no idea when they happened...I used my super sleuth observation skills & started to place them based on about how old I thought Brady was or how he looked.  He had his chubby phase & his Justin Bieber phase so that helped me use a process of elimination to get them alllll sorted.  (Plus I figured if I couldn't tell exactly how old he is, no one ELSE is gonna know either...)

There are WAY too many cute pics to include but I wanted to add this one for Marcia...it's Brady at the daycare Christmas party circa 2000.  (Or at least that's when I decided it was...)

I had 3 albums that held 80 pics each - which for you math whizzes means there was room for 240 pics total - so difficult decisions had to be made.  The ones that made the cut are put nicely (in chronological order) in the albums.  I found some fun stickers at Walmart so I jazzed up the boring, black albums a bit.

 

 No lie, those little 'graduation' themed puffy stickers were in the ONLY pack of graduation stickers in the whole place...I guess everyone else had the same idea as me...