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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Making Memories vs. Preserving Them

I've felt slightly bad that I had neglected my blog for so long. However, that can't compare to the YEARS of scrapbooking photos and memorabilia that sit in piles and boxes in my office and garage!

I used to enjoy scrapbooking. I made some pretty awesome books; creative keepsakes which provide a visual record of the highlights of our family's adventures and milestones. It's hard to say exactly when and what started my neglect of the hobby. I hesitate to say I have abandoned it, because I still have the sorted piles, the digital files, the voluminous stash of paper supplies and embellishments, and the software and templates for digital scrapbooking.

The problem is twofold: the longer the piles go untouched, and the more "stuff" that accumulates, the more overwhelming the whole idea becomes. It changes in my my mind from a hobby..a joy..into a chore. The other side of the coin is that (and I know everyone says this) I'm BUSY. Let me qualify my busy-ness, though. I'm busy MAKING memories!

I'm not using things like doctors appointments, homeschooling, general mom chores & taxi service as an excuse. Heck no! Other busy moms get together for scrapbooking parties, retreats, or work on their own In the evenings while catching up on their TV shows. Not me. Anyone who reads my twitter feed knows that Treklet & I are always on the go! I'm hardly ever IN my house, and when I am, I'm homeschooling or doing chores, and if I've been out during the day I rarely get the chance to sit until late at night. By then I just want a glass of wine, some sci-fi and my twitter feed.

You see, the busy-ness I'm really talking about is where all those photos come from! We are too busy MAKING memories to take time to glue them into some fancy embellished pages, which usually takes me longer to do than the actual photo ops did in the first place. There are theater performances, karate tournaments, day trips to museums and aquariums, bike rides, conventions (6 this year!), vacations, and always too many weekend events to see!

Having an iPhone in my pocket at all times has made it possible to have an effortless photo record of our lives. I'm able to snap a pic anytime, anywhere, with no pre-thought of packing a camera and loading film, no expense of developing and printing pictures. I take more photos than ever. My photos even upload automatically to cloud storage! While this is all amazing, it has made the scrapbooking practice a burden.

While I occasionally post a photoset online, and often post a shot on twitter (which is fleeting), most of the thousands of photos I have taken are in digital file folders, sorted by date. Most of those are not even renamed, but carry a computer generated number as a file name.

Someday, when I'm forced to slow down and be a homebody, and when Treklet is old enough to be off making memories without me, maybe I'll finish Katie's high school scrapbook, write down some thoughts in a vacation album, and put together an album of convention photos. If I were smart, I'd somehow keep a record of my tweets so I'll have something to refer back on for those little details. ;-)