E just turned 3, but I still haven’t finished putting all of her baby pictures in her baby album. I’m great at taking the photos, getting them developed and putting them away in the big photo albums, but not so good about writing captions and cutting out photos for her book. We have a gap in her first year, I have newborn photos, 3 month, 6 month and 1 year photos, but am pretty much missing her 9 month old photos. I know I took some photos then, but I have to take time and find them on my computer, and get prints made.

I’m sure you’ve heard of scrapbooking too, but I’ve not gotten into the whole phenomenon. It’s enough that I get my pictures put into albums. My mother had a few albums of us girls up until we were about 6 or 7, but the ones of us older and as teens are still in boxes somewhere. I guess with three girls her life just became too busy to keep up with the albums.

There are these super crafty moms (which I long to be) who will create scrapbooks of all their precious memories. There is your traditional scrapbooking where you get an album, but some fund papers, stickers, etc and glue your collage together, but I know that is definitely not for me.

Then last year I discovered digital scrapbooking and this fabulous site Scrap Girls. Some of the scrapbooking sites have free clips available for download, but the Scrap Girls site goes all out with a daily newsletter that gives you two freebies a day! They include background papers, cute frames, holiday ornaments and so forth. So I’ve been acquiring and downloading these images religiously for several months. It’s become an obsession of mine, but I’ve yet to “scrapbook” or design anything as of yet. I just don’t have the time.

I started out just getting the freebies, but later on began reading the newsletters, and they actually do have decent content. They have instructions on how to scrapbook digital and feature their designers and so forth, but frankly the women who do this seem to live in a whole different world than I do.

Most are stay at home moms, that work part time or not at all, and some are addicted to scrapbooking about their kids so much, that they feel they don’t spend enough time actually with them.

I showed one of my normal photo albums to a friend’s grandmother and she told me, “You’ll treasure those when you get older.” I guess the nice thing about photo albums versus scrapbooks is that you get to remember your photos the way they are, and your memories of the event. With scrapbooking, the design can be distracting and the memories may only dictate one of the things that occurred.

E always loves when I sit down with her and show her the albums and tell her stories of what happened in each pic. Don’t get me wrong, scrapbooks are lovely, but they just may not be for me.

Of course if I get Alzheimer’s in my old age, then I may regret not writing anything down. One of these days, I need to sit down with my computer and albums and start writing down those dates! Thank goodness for digital cameras and date stamps.