Scrapbooking and Memories

After admiring a beautiful scrapbook that my cousin put together for my aunt's75th birthday, I decided to begin putting together a memory book of my own. Something for our grandson to look through when he was older that would help capture some of the special moments in our lives.

First stop, the local craft store where I was overwhelmed with the number of choices of papers and glues, not to mention stickers and trims that are available to "pretty up" your book. Before I could choose the paper, I had to decide what size I wanted my book to be. Not knowing what would look best; I erred on the side of caution and picked one of each (they were on sale after all). That was easy, a bunch of papers that I like, some acid free glue sticks, a package of photo corners, and I'm ready to begin.

Where to begin? Photos. Good plan until I began to look through the thousands of images (yes thousands, aren't digital cameras wonderful) on my laptop and got lost in the memories they evoked. The night our grandson was born, so tiny I was afraid I might snap his legs the first time I changed his diaper. His first ride at an amusement park, Dollywood, where I learned it is not a good idea to take this opportunity away from a child's mother (but he really wanted to ride on the cute little pigs and she was on the roller coaster at the time). His first trip to Disneyland where his delight at meeting Mickey Mouse for the first time couldn't help but remind me of his mother's first visit there. You get the idea. Suffice it to say, little progress was made on the newly purchased books.

I have a new admiration for my cousin and her ability to decide which photos were worthy of inclusion in the birthday book. I do not share her discipline and find it hard not to become immersed my daydreams and memories.

This project is proving to be more difficult than I thought and it certainly isn't the "scrapbooking" of my childhood where my grandma and I clipped pictures of movie stars from magazines and pasted postcards received from relatives in the mail onto the manila pages of a book she had bought at Kresge's just for this purpose. Oh how I enjoyed those afternoons.

So now on to Plan B, print a bunch of photos, gather up ticket stubs and programs from our travels, put on a fresh pot of tea and invite my daughters to work on the book with me. Yes, that's what I will do. No matter whether or not we create a beautiful book to rival the birthday inspiration, we will share old memories and create new ones.

miss kimmy