Picture Perfect

We were enjoying our lazy Saturday morning, all still in our pajamas. Joey and I were sitting at the dining room table. I was drinking coffee. He was playing online poker. Blaine was playing Winter Olympics on the computer. Kylee was upstairs in our bed watching TV, we thought.

All of a sudden, she comes FLYING into our newly redone dining room, beside herself. She's crying so hard, I thought she was seriously hurt. She throws her cell phone at me and wails, "Get them back! Hurry, Mommy! Get them back!!"

Of course, I have NO idea what she's talking about. "What is it, Bug? What's the matter?" She says, "I was trying to delete the pictures on my phone I didn't want. I THOUGHT you highlighted the ones you wanted to keep, but when I hit delete, it deleted the ones I wanted!!" Y'all, this girl is CRYING, shoulder-shaking sobbing!

I look helplessly at Joey. I think I KNEW we couldn't get them back, but he's better at retrieiving stuff like that than I am. So I said, "Well, can we get them back?" And he said, "No. Cell phones don't have a recycle bin. They're gone." Bless her heart. She f.l.i.p.p.e.d! Now she's SCREAMING, "Yes, you can! You can! I NEED my pictures. You CAN get them back!" He softly explains to her that there's just no way. She says, "I'm so mad! I'm mad at myself and I'm mad at my phone!" And she runs up the stairs.

I go upstairs to try to comfort her, but she is NOT having it. I hug her tight and ask her what I can do. By this time, she has cried so hard that she has the deep, staccatto-type breathing you get when you've cried too hard too long. She tells me there's NOTHING I can do but get her pictures back. There is nothing I can do to calm her down. Then she starts telling me, "My pictures are my everything! They're all I had that were JUST mine, and I can NEVER get them back. You don't understand!" {of course I don't understand. i'm the mother, remember!}

I ask her which pictures she's specifically concerned about, and she tells me her pictures of Stetson and Brodie. I told her we could get more pictures of them. Still sobbing and staccatto breathing, she says, "But not THOSE pictures! People sent them to me. You didn't TAKE them!" I said, "I know, Bug, but I got the same pictures of Brodie, and Kellie can send you the pictures she sent you the first time of Stetson." Her response to that was, "She can't! She lost that phone. She doesn't have them anymore!"

I have realized that nothing at this point is going to calm her down or help her feel better, so I just start sending my pictures to her phone through text messages. She won't even pick up her phone and look at what I'm sending her, though. Then Joey comes upstairs and tells her he understands she's upset but she's acting like the people IN the pictures were gone, not just the pictures. She then picks up her phone and starts looking at what I'm sending her. Then she realizes she SAVED the text message Kellie sent her of Stetson. When she realized that and as she starts receiving my pictures, some of which were ones she had had, she slowly calms down.

She's fine now, and all is well. She can even talk about it and tell people what happened without tears. We're so glad. But we also realize this is just a glimpse of what is to come with a teenage girl!

I've heard raising teenagers is like nailing jello to a tree. Pray for us.