More Preaching to the Choir

An old friend sent me an e-mail asking me some questions about scrapbooking. Writing my response to her e-mail, reminded me how passionate I am about scrapbooking. Yes, I enjoy the creative outlet that it provides me. I love trying to make my pages visually appealing. But most of all, I love telling our story. And even if no one ever cares to read it, I've had fun telling it. And I can't help but believe there ARE people who will be interested...like my kids, for one.

I started "formally" scrapbooking sometime around the turn of the century. But I have always been a scrapbooker at heart. I would jot dates and notes on the backs of photos. I kept journals. I would make my own little scrapbooks by *gasp* gluing photos to pieces of paper and stapling them all together. I would slap pictures into albums that I bought at craft stores. I have always had an interest in taking photos and recording the details that went along with them. But when I stumbled onto Creative Memories, it was like I had just stumbled onto my own personal holy grail. Wow! This was exactly what I'd been looking for my entire life. And I cranked out the pages...did I ever. I pretty much scrapbooked every picture that came down the pike and I finished big, fat, thick scrapbooks like nobody's business. I gave numerous books away and I still have thirteen books sitting on my own shelves. I will sheepishly admit that those books cover a very small span of time...about a year and a half. Yes, yes, I was quite enthusiastic.

And then I had kids. The amount of photos increased and the amount of time I had to scrapbook decreased. Suddenly I found myself "BEHIND". Gradually the supplies got shoved out of the way, I found myself pulling them out less and less frequently. It was just too hard to do with all the kids. My husband had been telling me that I should just have online photo albums - and I did - but I missed the creative element of scrapbooking that I had always enjoyed. And then I discovered digital scrapbooking.

It was perfect. I could easily share my pages with others. I could do it without a lot of mess whenever I had a few minutes to myself. It was speedier - I could reuse a design multiple times. I can print as many copies of a book as I want (seems good for a mom of four). On so many levels, digital scrapbooking was the perfect thing for me.

As my enthusiasm for scrapbooking returned, I started reading books and magazines. And that drastically changed my thinking.

Ways that I've Changed My Philosophy:

I no longer buy into the concept of being "behind". I figure whatever I've done puts me ahead of nothing so now I'm always ahead. I see myself more as a family historian or a family archivist. I'm trying to keep track of our journey as effectively as I'm able to and I'm using several tools to accomplish this. I'm "journaling" our adventures in my blog. I'm taking tons of pictures and trying to take some video too. Someday I hope to revisit some of those things to put together "baby books" for the kids. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. There's no law that says I have to follow some sort of timeline and document every single thing, every single day. I just want my kids to get the "feel" for my interpretation of our lives. So now I scrapbook what I can and I feel good about it and I don't beat myself up for what I haven't done. I've also stopped thinking that I need to scrapbook every photo I take. Which is a good thing because these days I take a ton of photos! Instead I just think about the story I want to tell and then I find the best photos to go with my words. (For more on that check out Stacy Julian's book Photo Freedom.)

Valuable

I know that my posts have been very sporadic lately but I'm going to try to be more regular in the future. Scrapbooking, and all of its various components, is something that I really have a passion for and updating this blog makes me happy. Plain and simple.

This weekend I attended a memorial service for my grandparents. The last few years, any sort of event like this, I create a little slideshow documenting the life of the person being remembered. This event was no exception. I assembled a chronological review of my grandparents life in photographs. So far, people have always had kind words to say about the slideshows. As much as I'd like to take all the credit for this and claim that it's simply my amazing talent, I realize that it's actually the photographs themselves that are particularly compelling.

After this particular memorial, I chanced into a conversation with someone. She had just snapped some photos for me of my extended family and it prompted a conversation about photography. I don't think she realized I had anything to do with the slideshow, the conversation just came up because she'd taken pictures for me. She commented that just the day before, as she was sorting through some photographs, she started to question what she was doing. She said, "I was looking at a photo and thinking, my children don't even know who these people are. But this service reminded me that my photographs are meaningful."

To know that I'd had that impact on someone made me feel great. Because I too believe in the importance of pictures. I'm diligently documenting the lives of my family, my life, and on some small scale, the lives of people who are important to me. I don't know how many people will ever want to look at my photographs, but I hope some will and honestly, if no one else cares to, at least I know that I will enjoy looking back through my pictures and remembering times past.

The past few weeks, while working on this slideshow, I've looked at many photographs of my grandparents. As I tried to put the photographs into chronological order, I would ask my mother and my aunt for help. But in many cases they no longer remembered the details - if they ever even knew them to begin with. This is not the first time I've had this experience. When trying to organize pictures from my own childhood, I encountered the same difficulty. On numerous occasions my parents disagreed about the details - when and where the pictures were taken. I was always happy when there was a notation on the back of the photograph to steer me in the right direction. It doesn't take long to forget because even with my photographs of my own children, who have been a part of my life for less than a decade, I look back at pictures from the beginning and I've already forgotten so much.

Taking photographs is only half of preserving your history. The other half is recording the story. To me, that's the magic of scrapbooking. It's an opportunity to showcase photographs AND highlight the special stories that go along with them. And blogging is the newest way to accomplish this same goal. I'm still drawn to scrapbooking because it's also an opportunity to be creative and make something visually pleasing. I enjoy it. But I most of all, I just think it's so cool to put your stories and photographs together.

Sitting next to me is a stack of letters that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother while he was in the war. I offered to scan them so that my entire family can have copies of them. So I KNOW for a fact that if my grandparents had kept some sort of scrapbook, it's something we'd all treasure.

From Rapt 2 Scrap