Top Ten Throwbacks #1

I've had this idea roaming around in my head for a while now to do a top ten throwback series. Sometimes, as I pilfer back through my blog, I find things that either crack me up or really deserve an update or second visit for some reason, and I tell myself I should really throw back to some of the early days...and then I never do.

So I decided these next ten days will be my throwback days. Hope you enjoy! (Some of these posts may take you back to days before we even knew each other! Like this one, for example!)

I started blogging back in 2006 and had no particular direction for this blog. (I know. Some things never change.) But as I looked at those posts from what is now TWELVE YEARS AGO, I found something I just had to revisit.

The background. In 2006 I was hopelessly single, living in Marion, and working at Indiana Wesleyan. I had asked Mom if I could host the family Christmas that year so I could use modern technology to allow my sister in Kansas to actually be part of the family Christmas. She said yes, and that's how I came to host my first (I think) family Christmas.

Here is the original post if you'd like to read it in all its glory, but there are a few things I'd like to address, so I'll transfer some of the pictures to this post so you can see them easily.

Okay first of all, can we talk about the wall color? Ohhhh what a disaster this wall color was.

I can explain! For reasons still unknown to me, I wanted a living room with terra cotta colored walls. I am not particularly a southwestern style girl, so I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea for my house, but I did. I didn't have much money, so I saved my pennies and finally had enough to buy the paint, and when I did, it dried on the walls as decidedly PINK. PINK!!!!!!! Not terra cotta. I didn't have enough money to start all over, so my boss's wife helped me pick out a color to roll over it as a faux top design to soften the pink. Believe it or not, it did help, but I still cringe when I see these pictures. (This debacle had been fixed before I met Ryan. I doubt he would have married me otherwise. Just kidding. But he might have paused to question himself.)

But here was what I really wanted to talk about today. Do you ever stop to think about how far technology has come in these last twelve years?

When we included my sister that day, it looked a lot like this:

Where to begin? Do we start with how I had to disconnect my entire desktop computer in my office and haul it into the living room to reassemble it on top of my entertainment center? Do we talk about the boxy white monitor? Do we talk about the super cool speakers? Do we talk about all the cords? Do we talk about the alien-esque webcam clutching the top of the computer? Do we talk about Yahoo messenger: the video version?

WHERE DO WE BEGIN???

I laugh now when I see this because I remember what a huge, huge, huge ordeal it was to get all this set up and working for the day, so we could watch each other open gifts. Now? One punch of a FaceTime button and we're there!

(Ironically the ONLY time our family ever FaceTimes is on Christmas Day, so evidently we have not really kept  up with the times.)

Anyway. Anyone else remember these days of technology?

And before I go, let's not fail to mention the cordless home phone sitting next to the speaker! (I can't remember how many years I continued to have a home phone before I decided that was one extra bill I did not need.)

And though this picture was from a different post, I feel my first top ten throwback post would not be complete without a photo of your Bekah-girl from that technology-laden Christmas:

(Apparently computers are not the only smaller thing!)