Evan was “sick” today, so I let him stay home from church which meant I got a bonus 3 hours. (Ooh, that sounds terrible. I love church, it was just kind of fun to have time I hadn’t planned on appear suddenly in my day) I ended up spending it finishing the scrapbook pages I started on Friday at my friend’s monthly club. I like the idea of scrapbooking, and do lots of mental scrapbooking, but I don’t do it enough to call myself a true Scrapbooker, with a capital S.
Today illustrated why. It took me pretty much 3 hours to get about 10 photos done. The pages my pal had designed were spectacular and I had a lot of fun personalizing her original concepts and even got the chance to journal about the fourth of July 2001 (the last one before 9/11), but 3 hours! I have thousands of photos waiting for me. I hear them weeping that their chance will never come when it takes me 3 hours to get 10 pictures taken care of.
I will keep going to club and continue to be inspired by my friend’s prodigious talent and comittment. I will even finish my 48 pages. They will be amazing, I’m sure. In the meantime, however, I will continue my particular brand of scrapbooking that gets the photos into albums, with journaling, for everyone to enjoy but there is nary a brad or ribbon to be found. I find a 
roll of photos, grab one of my discount blank scrapbooks that I pick up from time to time, glue the photos in, journal about the event and usually, I’ve done 24 or 36 photos in an hour. My inspiration is this: my mom has one album of her mother’s–one of those plain old black ones with black pages and black and white photos taken with a little brownie box camera–one or two per page, labeled with the date, the names and the places. It is about 20 pages. That book is a family treasure and is the very definition of simplicity. I love looking through it and even though it is only 20 or 30 photos on plain black paper, it is riveting to me.
I have gotten into digital scrapbooking and can get photos arranged and enhanced really quickly that way, and I like doing it. I like Heritage Makers books, but the Apple and Epson books are cool, too. The first ones I did were on shutterfly.com and they got me hooked. Mostly, I like having the photos available for my kids to look at. It is a sweet thing to watch them looking through an album and sometimes I question whether I want them exclaiming over my amazing paper-wrangling skills or actually looking at the pictures.
The bottom line is, I love photos-they are my primary way of telling my family’s story, so naturally I think that preserving them is important, I’ve just had to let myself off the hook. I take hundreds of photos a year and I have to give myself a chance to catch up. I take my hat off to you gals (like my friend who hosts the club) who have albums and albums of amazing, detailed, artistic pages. I love your work and I need you in my life for inspiration! If you need a break, or you’re more like me, with lots of good intentions and pictures in boxes, call me up, we’ll have some chocolate together, glue some pictures in old-fashioned albums (acid and lignin free of course) and know that our grandchildren will love them.
PS. Sara just finished reading Twilight and loved it. She did not put it down for 4 solid days. Thanks to everyone for turning me onto it. I am saving it for August-post Harry Potter but Pre-seminary. Look for me in the hammock.
My Red Door Days 