Picture Frames

During my first trip to San Diego when Nick and I were dating, he took me to the San Diego Zoo (and a whole lot of other places).  I bought a picture frame in the gift shop and later, put in a picture of the two of us together that my brother took.  Later, during my next trip when he took me to Disneyland, I bought a second frame...and then one at Sea World, and then one at Six Flags Magic Mountain.  It became a thing.  Now, we have dozens of them, marking the places we've been together.  You can literally watch our lives progress through the photos.  As we've added children, destinations, states...it's like a timeline of our life.  We have one rule--we do not replace the old photo if we visit that place again and our family has changed.  So, the picture we took at the Philadelphia Zoo only has 2 of our daughters even though Isabelle has been there dozens of times.  She wasn't with us on the visit where we bought the frame.  We also don't typically buy more than one frame per location.  The exception to that is Dorney Park--we bought the first fram the first time we went but the second time held such significance for Iris--she conquered her fear of roller coasters and the photo taken on the coaster she was most proud of was actually a decent picture so we bought it.

We've moved our frames around a bit as the shelves have gotten more numerous and the wall space scarce.  Right now they're in our basement where we've set up a quasi-family room/den/scrapbooking nook.  And it was there that tragedy struck the picture frames.  As you can see in the photo, there are two layers above the TV.  Nothing is attached to the wall up there--it's concrete.  Nick has precariously placed bricks and stacked shelves onto bricks and then frames onto shelves.  It's rather delicate but being a foundation wall, it doesn't move...much.  One morning, we were down there having coffee and I noticed that one frame was about to topple over which could have been disaster for multiple others.  He immediately rushed to fix it and caused the feared disaster in the process.  Several frames fell.  Most of them are pretty cheap plastic (few have glass) but some are ceramic.  The one from the San Antonio Schlitterbahn was ceramic and it was that poor fram that toppled down and broke into many pieces.

My trusty hot glue gun was no match for this brake.  The Schlitterbahn was no more.  Now, in many cases, we can revisit the location where we got the frame (anywhere in San Diego or Philadelphia) or, in a few cases, the frame is something I made because we couldn't find one while we visited that captured the moment (Korea).  But the Schlitterbahn wasn't one of them.  It was actually in New Braunfels, TX and somewhere I had wanted to go since I was pregnant with Ivy.  Sitting in our apartment alone in Chicago, I saw an entire episode of some show that was all about water parks and it featured the Schlitterbahn.  I wanted to go ever since and when my brother moved to San Antonio several years later, we had our chance!  It was a spectacular trip full of good and bad memories (not to be rehashed here...) and the frame was very nice.  Star fish and sea horses and sand dollars and...well, you get the idea.

Sad but determined, I went to the Schlitterbahn website to see if maybe they had an online gift shop.  They did, but no picture frames.  Sigh.  It was early in the morning, so calling wouldn't help but there was an email.  Now, it's fall.  I didn't even know if the place was open.  The water park sure wasn't.  But I took a chance.  Writing a note and attaching a photo of our broken frame, I emailed the general box and waited.

James, the kind soul who works there was happy to help, send me pictures of what they had in the store and added the one of my choice to the website so I could re-order it.  It's not the same frame, but it is just perfect for our wall. It has recently arrived and once again, our wall is complete... well, as complete as it ever is.  It seems we always have one or two that are sitting there empty because I just haven't gotten around to ordering prints yet.  Oh well.  It has character!

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