virginia

This past week we spent some time in Williamsburg, Norfolk and Hampton Virgina for a last week of the summer, before school, family vacation. And because I always forget about my TimerCam app, I don’t have any proof that I was with these four handsome men.

And one day I wasn’t with them!

This wasn’t one of those relaxing kinds of vacations. Every now and then we take those (like when we went to The Cottage a few weeks ago) and sometimes we take the kind where we do lots of things and wake up in time to eat the free breakfast at the hotel and stay up late because well, it’s summer and that’s what you do.

when in williamsburg

We’ve been to Colonial Williamsburg area before as a family, and Chad took the boys last year for a homeschool trip, so this time we toured the USS Wisconsin and did go-carts and restaurants and the hotel pool. One day the fellas all went to Busch Gardens and since I’ve somehow turned into an old lady who no longer can ride roller coasters, I opted out and asked for advice on instagram where I should go for good coffee, books & thrifting.

So I had one of those caramel blended drinks at Aroma’s Coffee in Williamsburg, I went to the DAV thrift store on Merrimac, and I had lunch with just me and a book at the Baker’s Crust. Thanks for all the advice on where to go!

I walked around Colonial Williamsburg by myself (y’all it was SO fun!) and took a million photos of house parts, because I am me.

williamsburg

This year I didn’t even take my real camera. I relied solely on my camera phone which takes great photos and makes my life so much easier until this…

full

UGGGGG!!! So I do what so many of us do and quickly scroll through the most recent of the 2000 photos that I have in my iPhone and delete whatever seems irrelevant which is almost nothing because I’ve been doing this for the past six months and now I’ve deleted almost everything that I don’t like.

Yes, I know I could ‘simply’ plug in my phone and download the photos, but last time I did that they all got moved around in my computer and I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Besides, my computer has over 20,000 photos already, and I’ve been meaning to organize those for years. It’s one of those important, non-urgent things that I’ve always meant to do.

And two computers ago, I lost EVERY photo because my computer was dropped on the floor and nothing could be recovered. I need a safe place to store my photos where I’m not required to name, organize and babysit it all the time.

photo storage

I just got the LyveHome photo storage device and so far I love it. You download the LyveApp and you can connect your whole family’s devices–so any phones or tablets or computers and they can all connect wirelessly with your wifi or there is pretty much every type of plug-in hole imaginable so you can load photos from old hard drives, flash drives, SD cards or whatever you have. You can set it up to automatically store every photo you take on your phone and load on your computer so you can safely delete as many photos as you need to from your phone. YES. No babysitting.

This magical photo storage box automatically stores every photo you take.

the boys

Plus, it acts as a digital photo frame as it sits in your house because you can set it to scroll through your photos which is fun. When I want to see the past photos I took on my phone I don’t have to have them all saved in my camera app using up my storage, I simply click the LyveApp on my phone and I can access all my photos there and they are organized by date.

photo storage

It’s got 2TB of storage and I have no idea what that means but I do know that after syncing the photos from my phone (2322 photos and 24 videos) I still had 99% of space left. Apparently, this can hold over million photos. That means I don’t have to think about photo storage for a long, long time. Amen.

The Last Giveaway of the Summer

lyve

We’ve had lots of fun giveaways this summer and this is the last one for a while. You can enter to win your own LyveHome device, just click over to the LyveHome site, watch the quick video then come back here and leave a comment telling us how many photos you currently have on your phone and what part of LyveHome appeals to you. Winner chosen the first week of September.

This post is sponsored by LyveHome, opinions and grammatical errors are all mine.

Winners of the metallic linen pumpkins and Dyson giveaway will be announced this coming week!