The Reluctant Scrapbooker

Oh, my friends, I hate dealing with pictures. I love having the pictures neatly arrayed in albums. I love looking back at my sons when they were two, five, eight years younger than they are now, and seeing how much they have changed. I love the details that the pictures bring back to me, like how utterly un-childproof our house was before Alex started crawling, and how bright the orange living room wall really was in our rented Edinburgh house. (Britons seemed to us to go in for brighter interior walls than Americans, perhaps as a remedy to the all-too-frequent drabness of the weather.)

I wish I could get someone else to make the albums, though.

Last summer I caught up through July 2007, but I hadn't done a thing since then. I had my FIL's vacation pictures from August to deal with, perhaps three dozen of them. No one needs three dozen pictures of a week-long vacation, but I wasn't looking forward to culling them.

I find album duty stressful because I'm worried about what will happen if I don't do it -- the younger siblings who will say, "But where are the pictures of me?" and the queries that will be unanswerable if I don't answer them soon ("Why does Pete have that colander on his head in fourteen separate pictures?" "Uh...he had a secret yearning to be a noodle?"). I do not have grand ambitions; I do not own a corner rounder and I have never put cute little die-cut soccer balls around anybody's first soccer pictures. I slap them in albums, with occasional captions if I know I'll want to remember something later.

Today I bit the bullet and started organizing the five envelopes of pictures from Snapfish that had been awaiting my attention. I finished August, vanquishing the messy pile of vacation pictures, and September, and all but the last day of October. I am out of blank album pages or I would have cruised ahead into November. I suppose it should feel like I accomplished something, but all I can think is UGH! Eight more months to go!

Do you like scrapbooking? I probably can't even call it scrapbooking, what I do, but albuming isn't a word. (Scrapbooking wasn't a word fifteen years ago, I guess, so maybe I could lobby for albuming: Is scrapbooking too hardcore for you? Do Creative Memories parties fill you with performance anxiety? Call Albumers Anonymous, where we will assure you that we are also months behind and don't even plan to make up for it with pretty little patterned background papers.) Are you caught up on pictures? Do you feel guilt about the whole stupid thing? Any success stories of child conscripts who have come to love scrapbooking and have taken the noisome task off their weary mothers' hands?

Was this the whiniest post ever? Here are some pictures to compensate. Here's Pete last summer, washing the van. Elwood is building the kids a treehouse, and here the younger boys are enjoying it. Here is the treehouse in perspective. (I love that tree. It blooms beautifully every April and it shades the south side of our house all summer long.) The older boys are getting ready to dig into Alex's half-birthday baked Alaska. (When you have a birthday that falls between Christmas and New Year's, you get a half-birthday celebration too.) And last, here is a pair of Quill Lace socks, which I finished weeks ago but for weaving in the ends. That took me until this week to accomplish. Even for a person who loves crazy socks, they're pretty...vivid.

Comments

[mary]

Hi. My name is Mary, and I am an ... albumer.

I try to put them in albums pretty quickly, and I do buy albums that have a little spot for writing a caption, but albums they are.

My husband and I made some fancier scrapbooks (with fancy paper! And stickers!) for our more exciting vacations, but that was before we had a kid. Now we don't do so much vacation and the pictures are lucky to get into the albums.

Also, I should mention that your boys are awfully cute. Or should I say handsome??

[Sarah]

All of our pictures are digital and we keep all 6,000 of them in iPhoto. We have a computer with an Olympian Harddrive (and all of our photos are backed up on an off-site server). Every year or so we pick out some of the highlights and have a photobook printed off. I think we use apple.com's service. Sometimes we have 4x6 prints made for grandparents or for P to bring to work.

We take so many pictures. The best way to keep them all organized is to keep them digital for now.

[amy]

I'll join. About two months ago, I even outed myself to my neighbor, a scrapbooker who acknowledges herself to be about a year or so behind. She looked perplexed until I described how I saw it:
-I have the supplies and I enjoy it, but
-I am over three years behind with my daughter and I have a baby due in September, so
-if I want to preserve the existing pictures, simply getting them into my already-purchased scrapbooks in album formation seems to be the best solution.
-Also, my family seems to think I need all the pictures they never put into albums, so I have piles of pictures that defy organization, so
-putting those pics into scrapbooks/albums with just a small caption so the knowledge isn't lost is really better than losing them.

Right?

I mean, I hope so, because that is totally what I'm going to do. Sometime this summer. I swear. ;)

[Rebecca]

Hello, my name is Rebecca and I haven't put pictures in albums since 2004. Yes, I am four years behind. Now that I have a little one I am trying to catch up. I get my pictures through Shutterfly.com and they have photo books that are so easy to put together. I did one for Audrey's first six months and it turned out great!

[ann (fchen)]

i love that you celebrate your son's half birthday. as a 12/28'er, i so wish that my parents would have instituted a plan like that for me. of course, my older brother is 6/29, so that would have not been fun for them or him, i suppose!
:)