This weekend I decided to organize my scrapbooks a bit. They were getting unwieldy. Hard to look through. Some were bursting. My family got me several empty albums for Mother's Day that were waiting for their innards. And there were dozens of pages sitting on the shelf wanting a home.
I was reading recently about various ways to organize your books to make them more user friendly. And I decided to play around a little with what I had. I noticed that I have lots of pages about various aspects of living in New York. I have lots of pages about our yearly (and um, sometimes twice a year) trip to the beach. But there are not enough to fill a whole album. Not yet. Then, of course, there are the Halloween and Christmas and birthday pages. So I divided my pages into four categories: Holidays, People We Love, Our Family (meaning the 3-4 of us), and Andrew. Andrew has two of the the five albums.
I know what you are thinking...what about Isaac? Andrew will always have more pages than Isaac. And, well, I would venture to say that you would be right. And there is one good reason for it. Andrew was born first. Three years of Andrew's life were All Andrew. I doubt Isaac will have any years that are All Isaac (unless we don't have any more kids...then Isaac will get 10th, 11th and 12th grade just him and his parents! Lucky Duck. Even then though...I doubt I'll be filling as many scrapbooks with the cute things Isaac said...at 17). So instead of worrying about the imbalance and letting it get to me...I'm just going to work with what I've got. My main goal in doing this scrapbook thing is to record our stories. So if I am doing that...I think I'm good.
I like this system because it is flexible. Someday I will have enough pages for an album just about Christmas. So I'll do some rearranging and put those together. And of course, probably within the year, there will be an Isaac album too. I like how these groupings will grow and morph and change and that that is okay. And way better than pages sitting around on my shelves, not only not in a scrapbook, but not even in page protectors!
I was assembling these books last night in between chunks of time comforting a very, very fussy baby (so fussy actually that Dave asked me, "Is this what they mean by the Terrible Threes? The Terrible Three Weeks?"). And I made the labels today while the boys were resting. I would like to make little tabs to go inside the albums to break them up a little further. But I still need to think that through a little.
And in the meantime...get some rest.
4 comments:
First of all, I'm totally jealous of your scrapbooking skills.
Secondly, I remember going to the doctor for our two week visit and telling her we just couldn't believe how easy Timothy was and how he never cried and did well at night and all that. Well, that was the last of that. It felt like he cried for, well, the next 6 months. That's not entirely true, but it sure felt like that at times. It was just tough when we had absolutely no idea what was going on.
I hope the fussy little guy is happy today and feeling better from whatever was causing him discomfort.
Robyn, how many scrapbooks do you have total?
I have 5 of our fam and 1 from college. And I have 5-6 little albums (like the one I did in December that was a daily account of our holiday). I find the quantity part a little embarrassing...But I love the process so much and I love having our stories recorded somewhere...so I need to get over the part where having a million scrapbooks by the time my oldest is 5 a little embarrassing and just keep going.
for now at least...
My grandma has kept scrapbooks for all of her eight grandchildren from birth to present. I think she has made seven or eight for me at this point. Not everybody has that many, but everybody has multiple books. Then she has a set for herself, and a heritage set, with all the old black and whites. She has a big shelf in a large closet full of scrapbooks. Every now and again, we take them out and look at them.
Since you said it makes you uncomfortable, I thought it might be comforting to you to know that somebody outdoes you, quantity-wise. ;) And that people appreciate it.
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