Pain and Panic

I'm in a state of shock and panic and mortification and sheer emotional pain. If you've heard my latest family drama, you may think this is because of the recent haircut my daughter decided to give herself. But it's not (although, more on that to come... once I'm recovered from this NEW drama). No... I have lost my entire photo library on my computer. It's lost. Gone. Completely vanished. My babies births and birthdays, precious moments of crawling, first teeth, smiles, and random candid moments of our life... gone. Now, I'm no computer genius, but I am computer savvy and I have exhausted every conceivable route of finding these pictures. But they are simply not on my computer. I've called Apple only for them to tell me there's absolutely no way they could be gone unless I deleted them. OF COURSE I DIDN'T DELETE THEM! MORONS! (Although I have learned through some online research that through some keystroke commands you can delete files and empty your trash permanently, and I DO happen to have two keyboard pounding crazy little girls. Heaven help me ...and them!... if that is how this happened!) But what's that you say? Just restore my backup files? Ah, yes... this would be the part where if anyone has a loaded gun, I wouldn't mind borrowing it. I do not have any backup files of my pictures. *pull trigger now*. Yes, the tears are flowing and I'm rather distraught. I do have a few picture files in random locations on my computer, but nothing near my entire library. My two saving graces at this moment are 1) this blog, and 2) my mom. 1) This blog has most of the important/cute pictures from the past few years, so at least I've got those (albeit generally shrunken down in size). And 2) My mom has been at almost every important event in my life these past 3-4 years, and THANKFULLY takes many pictures. I'm going to be relying on her to be willing to make me more copies of those pictures to send to me. Mom?? Help?! Please??!!!!!! Other than these two sources and the random pictures on my computer, I think I'm just going to have to kiss the rest good-bye. I know there are recovery companies out there, but there's no guarantee of what I could get back, and I really don't want to spend that kind of money for just a chance. In the meantime, I would just like to tell you all one thing... BACKUP YOUR IMPORTANT FILES!!!!!!!!