Caused double upset with birthday photos

[Rae36]

Dmil has dementia. She regularly gets my sons muddled up, they look quite similar at the best of times and since I could only do one style of lockdown haircut they look even more similar than usual right now. Not being able to remember their names really upsets her.

I printed out some recent photos to give her, just printed them out on plain a4 paper on our home printer and cut them up. I was saying to ds14 that we should write on the back who each person is and he suggested sticking them on to a piece of paper and writing underneath so she can see the photo and the name at the same time.

We looked in some drawers and dug out an unused scrapbook, sellotaped each photo on to a page and wrote a caption underneath. Gave the book to mil who was delighted.

This past week I've had messages from dh's older daughter who is 23 saying that she's upset about being in only one photo in the book. There are maybe 20 photos in the book in total, just a random selection of photos. We've only seen dsd once since lockdown and took a photo on that day which is in the book, she doesn't live near us and she works in a busy job so it's hard to meet up. We don't usually see her that often anyway. Dh's older son is not in the book at all, even though we see him quite often, and he's not bothered.

Dh's sister then also contacted us to say that she is upset that we produced a photo book for mil and her kids are not included. Her kids are older teens, we haven't seen them at all since Christmas. She has seen the book, she knows it's home printed photos stuck in an old kids scrapbook with Mickey Mouse on the front, but she is still upset. Said that she feels that we want mil to remember our kids names but not hers.

If I had produced an expensive online photo book deliberately aimed at helping her remember and recognise each family member then I can see that not including everyone would not have been good. I wouldn't have done that. But was IBU in spending 20 minutes making a quick scrapbook and writing names on it?

I thought I was doing something nice and now I wish I hadn't bothered.

Did I do the wrong thing?

(Bearing in mind that in the past sil has given mil calendars for Christmas with photos of just her kids on them, and one year dsd gave a set of 4 cushions with 4 different photos of her riding her horse printed on them. No attempt to include all grandchildren equally, no complaints from me)

[LovePoppy]

I can understand why DSD is hurt (but that doesn’t make her right)

SIL is just plain wrong.