Camera troubles

I cried so hard the other day.

Our camera has had major issues lately. Usually if it has a full battery it is fine, just, once the battery looses any amount of power (less than 3 bars of juice), it will black out, and not take a picture. You can still view pictures, or do other low-power using functions with it, but try taking a picture, and BLACK OUT.
Sometimes when it does this, it also resets the date to 2007, therefore imprinting the images with an incorrect date and time (this SO messes up catalogues on my computer!). So, I just had to make sure the batteries are ALWAYS on full power.

But...just before Tyler's birthday party, it decided it wasn't going to flash. Ever. So, you push the button, and the 'flash error' comes on. It would blink for 30 seconds, and not take the picture. Full battery and all! Grr.
I turned the flash off, and got a couple cute pictures of his party, but most of them were blurred in some way, because my camera just takes blurry pictures when the flash is turned off..even if there is plenty of light.

But...guess what? I lost all those pictures.......

Because a couple days later, I decided I was gonna find out if I had accidentally messed some setting up in the menu, that was making the camera have all these funky issues. I saw a setting that said "format", and it was turned off. "Hmm. I wonder if I turn the format on, it will help?".

"NO IMAGES!" blinks on the screen.

"What the heck did I do????? Jonathan! It just deleted all the pictures on here! It says there are no images!!"

Yep. It deleted them all. I burst into tears, and sweet Jonny just sat me down in front of the fire and let me cry it out while he made the boys hush. Then he said we could just have our own little "second party" for Tyler, to get some pictures.
I know it wasn't the end of the world, but I just felt so stupid and wretched for deleting my poor baby's 2 year birthday party pictures. I spent almost his whole birthday party trying to get those few "fair quality" pictures in the first place, then I just accidentally deleted them all. Not to mention the other pictures of the boys that were on there from before the party.

SO, we won't click that menu option again! But, Jonathan says we can get a new camera soon, so I won't have to deal with this frustration. Meanwhile, I just have to keep batteries charged, take well-lit pictures with the flash on auto (so it won't need to flash), and upload them ASAP so they don't somehow get deleted or lost. *SIGH*