We were robbed

While we were on the vacation of a lifetime, three weeks in Southern California, and what I think were some kids broke into our house.

They climbed over the back fence and jimmied a window in the kitchen open with a screwdriver. They took the car keys off the key holder and drove the Saturn around to the garage, then loaded it up with our stuff and drove away.
They took my wedding ring. All my jewelry but a few pieces that were dropped or overlooked.
They cleaned out the girl’s movie drawer, taking everything we hadn’t taken with us to entertain them in the car on the drive to California and back. They took the Gamecube and all our games.
They took the monitor to the desktop computers, and took my laptop.

They took a disk case that sat next to the computer, that contained all my backup files. They took all my photos from about 2004 on, nothing of which have I printed out since Thing 1’s birthday last year. All the backups, all the masters.
They took my writings.
Since Thing 1 was born, I’ve been keeping a diary on her. I started a separate one on Thing 2 when she was born, but last year I combined them as it was getting cumbersome to keep two diaries updated.
I had upwards of 65 pages of journal entries, like this one, about their babyhoods. Sometimes I wrote every day, sometimes I’d skip a couple of months, but I wrote down things they said, details about what happened the days they took their first steps, ate their first solid foods, first started potty training. I kept track of the especially cute vocabulary words they said, things that I don’t even remember now to give examples of.

They took it all. They don’t even know what they have. They don’t even want it … and it is so precious to me… I cannot recreate it. I can’t even remember it. So carefully preserved, so proudly written down. I was so pleased that someday I would be able to hand my girls this diary of their babyhoods, so many precious moments recorded.

But now it’s lost.

They took it.
I keep hoping for some miracle. That I will remember someone I emailed the file to – I didn’t. That there will be some backup copy, kept somewhere else that I will find. But there isn’t.

It’s hard to write about. It … just makes me so sad.

I can keep going with information about them now… but it just kills me that so much is gone. They were so cute and so funny and I was so proud of myself for having written about them.
It’s just so hard – they grew so fast as babies, and it was such fun to write down what they said and did.

>sob<