As I wrote last post, my mission this month is to get on some cleaning and that includes cleaning out our crazy office/craft room so that I actually want to use it and it doesn’t take an hour to hunt down supplies or not lose my mind with the stuff everywhere…

Well, during a beginning effort to go through the chaos that is that space, I found a little gem from my past. It’s the first scrapbook I ever made. It is from a starter kit that I’m pretty sure a family member ordered me off QVC or something and it documents a huge component of my jr. high life. It doesn’t, however, show anything from my family or my school. It shows life in a theatre troupe called Creative Zone which I participated in for 3-4 years… and to be fair, I probably spent more time with those people than I did with my own family given how many hours a week I was in rehearsals…

But also given that I was in jr. high/beginning high school and was having a ROUGH time in life then… that’s what I wanted to document. It’s so interesting looking through this falling apart book… I had interviewed everyone in my troupe and given them an individual page as well as group pages and theme pages. I was actually pretty surprised to look back through and see some of the detailed or crafty choices I made for layouts… things that are adorable and probably reflect other scrapbooks I loved at the time but which would totally NOT be my style now. It is one of those delightful the medium is the message type of things where HOW I chronicled this piece of my life reflects my life at that moment. And that’s fine. I’m still wondering if I should keep it though. It’s a BIG book and filled with people who are no longer like a second family, though my very fond memories of them remain and I even keep in touch with several of them and have a great deal of affection to this day….

Note how this is FALLING APART which is the main reason I’m considering letting it go…

All that to say that finding that book became an excellent reminder to assess how I am chronicling my time and my family’s journey. What will I still care about 10 or 20 years down the road? What are the details I wish I knew? What are the pictures that will still make me smile or trigger a memory? Will I care if I found the perfect matching accessory? Maybe… if I remember how much it made me happy to spend the time finding it… but odds are good it won’t really matter one way or the other, I just want my memories accessible instead of hidden on some dusty hard-drive or still unorganized on my computer (that’s another part of my cleaning goal!!! It will take MUCH longer than this month to get through all that digital stuff though, but bit by bit right?!) And watch, I’m saying that about hard drives now but who knows, maybe ten years down the road I’ll be doing everything digitally and I won’t care as long as people get to learn a little bit about this time in our life and as long as these pictures keep bringing us JOY!