This is a post I started drafting just after our big trip last month. Since then it has been quite delayed due to mourning my grandma and then having our whole family get sick with the cold/sinus infection that just won’t quit! We’ve been exhausted and are still not quite back to normal but slowly trying to get there. Today is my grandma’s memorial and I debated waiting to finish this post until that and father’s day was over this weekend, but I feel like there’s always a reason to put it off until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow so may as well start today, right? So let’s get started:
Since my last post on chronicling I have done a TON of work in this area. I’ve been working like a crazy person to put the finishing touches on our office/craft room and that meant going through boxes and boxes of pictures and getting rid of duplicates/super blurry prints/etc. (I kid you not I think I had about 16 copies of my prom photo… WHY?!)

In organizing all these prints I also found my old, fairly modest scrapbook supplies and my half-finished scrapbook from my summer I studied abroad in London. The scrapbooking supplies were divided into trash (After almost 10 years, glue and photo stickers do NOT stay useful), keep (so many colors of paper and cardstock!), and repurpose for crafting activities with my son (SO many stickers very clearly from the 90s or that were just not my style in one way or another that my toddler will be THRILLED to add to his coloring pages! Waste not want not). The scrapbook was a bit of a conundrum- I had to think about the mementos I’d kept and the photos I’d cropped and what I wanted to do to finish. I decided to proceed in the same style of more traditional scrapbooking, but I decided to pull some of the pictures that I love because they weren’t necessarily a central part of the story I wanted to keep forever and pass down (a few pictures at the pub? Awesome. Three pages of clubbing in London? Maybe just keep a few favorites and move on…)

I did not miss all those little sticky photo tabs…

As I mentioned a few months ago, most of April was spent with my husband working long distance so nights when I would usually spend time with him or go to yoga I ended up working on pages in this scrapbook. After doing the rest of my chronicling this year with the help of Project Life as a guide (whether it be the physical for my disposable camera wedding pictures and travel scrapbook or the app for my day to day memory keeping this year), I was SHOCKED to discover how much longer traditional scrapbooking took. I had completely forgot the time required just to add little sticky double sided tape pieces to each picture let alone the time required to create layouts and position cropped photos and re-glue heavier pieces of embellishment etc. etc. I am STILL not finished with this book though I did complete several pages and needed to order additional sleeves for the scrapbook, but I still have many pages to go. I am happy to rediscover this other type of creativity in memory keeping and it may be something I come back to in the future, but that is definitely not the phase of life I’m in right now. It was a lot easier when I could spread things out all over the floor and know no one would run in and touch it and try to use the scissors on their hair (thankfully this is only a theoretical scenario and NOT something that happened with my toddler last month!) But regardless of the medium, I’m just happy to make progress towards getting these memories in albums on shelves instead of stuffed into the back of closets. (Although I won’t lie, as the year continues I am starting to get a little nervous about how much space is going to be taken up by albums! I haven’t even started on organizing my digital pictures from the last ten years and saving those memories!)

On a related note, I caught up with two months worth of current memory keeping thanks to the Project Life App. I did it on plane rides to and from NY when I wasn’t reading or feeding snacks to our little jetsettign toddler and it was so easy and fast! We also have some amazing memories to add to our vacation album once I get home and decide which photos to print. I feel like, at least going FORWARD, I have a good grasp on scrapbooking. It’s just catching up on all the backdated stuff that still has me puzzled! Still, one step at a time, right? And in the first half of this year I have definitely made some major progress.