Celebrating our family…… with scrapbooks

Umm…. yes…. it’s true.  I am one of those people…..  you know what I am talking about.  The kind who likes to create colorful and detailed scrapbook pages of all of the meaningful (and sometimes not so meaningful) events in my children’s lives, and adorn those pages with decorative ribbons, stickers, and other fancy embellishments.  And it’s kind of a problem….

You see, these two sets of shelves show the books that I have completed for just two of my children…..  my oldest, just 10 years old, currently has 14 completed leather-bound scrapbooks detailing his life…..  and two that are awaiting completion….  and my 8 year old has 13 completed scrapbooks with one more awaiting completion…..and of course each of the other four kids has a fair number of completed books along with one or two awaiting completion………which leads to the next half of the problem…

These shelves hold all of the pages that I have “pre-built”….  meaning that I have selected the pictures, the embellishments, the color-coordinated papers and have typed up and printed all of my journaling (that’s scrap-speak for the written descriptions of the events on the page)……  and have filed them here by  book.  So you’ll see, there are seven full books on the shelves that need to be “assembled”….  plus two more unassembled books that are all over my kitchen counter right now.  All told, right now I have 314 pages “pre-built”….. Now considering that it takes me about 20-30 minutes to do all of the cutting, trimming, and gluing to assemble 2 pages….  I am looking at approx. 78 hours of time needed to finish assembling the pages for these books.  But wait- there’s more…..  after I have assembled the pages, I carefully scan each page into my computer (a process made even more complex that I scrap in a 12″ x 12″ format, and home scanners can only scan up to 11″ at a time, which means I have to scan each page 2 times, and then allow Photoshop to “stitch them together” into one unified image), save them in IPhoto, and then burn each scrapbook onto a disk (I would be devastated if my house burned down and I lost all of these books, wouldn’t I?) which goes into  a safe-deposit box at our bank (I swear!)  So if it takes me another 15 minutes to scan, stitch, and save 2 pages, that is another 39 hours of time that I need to find…  just to get “caught up”……

And seriously………  by the time each of my kids graduates high school or maybe college or basically at whatever point I decide that I am done chronicling their lives, they will each probably have 25 scrapbooks……  and whatever in the world are they going to do with them?  I mean, would anyone want to sit down and shuffle through the minute details of their childhood as showcased in 1000 pages loving preserved by their mother?  And what will their future spouses think?  That their mother-in-law had waaaaaayyyyy  too much time on her hands, and should have had a paying job, certainly……

So why do I do it?  Because I love to, of course…….  because as I am working on assembling the pages, it allows me to reflect back on those days and remember how I felt then, and how much more grown up the kids are now.  Because when I go up to the bookshelves where I store these monstrosities……  and I randomly pull one out, and rifle through the pages, I love how beautiful they are to me, and how each page is a celebration of one of the more wonderful people in my life.  So maybe I am really not doing it just for them….  maybe I am doing it for me too…….