Scrapbook

I have been a scrapbooker since 2002, before my Big Girl was born. When I was pregnant with her, I started her book. Before she was born, there were already a half-dozen pages in her book: about her dad and me, a family tree page, baby shower pages, etc. When she was a tiny baby, I actually kept up with her book pretty well. She was a doll baby, a good sleeper, and let me spend quite a lot of time on my new hobby. The first 6 months of her life overfilled the 12" x 12" Creative Memories baby book. So there are 2 volumes for Big Girl's first year.

As Big Girl got older, it was harder and harder to keep up with the scrapbooks. I had less time to do it with a toddler to chase, plus there were other things going on in my life that took my attention away from the things I enjoyed.

Along came Little Girl in 2005, and I knew there was no way I'd be able to do for her what I had done for her sister. (To try and make up for that, I made a cross-stitch thing that hangs on her wall, which is something I didn't do for Big Girl.) But I did try my best to keep it up.

During that time I started transitioning to digital scrapbooking, which is much easier in some ways. You can do the work on the computer, and print however many copies you want of the end result with no extra work at all. I made digital books for grandparents as Christmas presents. If I hadn't had all the supplies and books, and paper and such at that point, I'd have gone digital completely at that point.

And then tragedy struck my scrapbooking world.

In November of 2006, my hard drive crashed. The last backup we had was from early December of 2005. I lost pictures of Little Girl's first Christmas, first birthday, first steps, all the funny things she did between the ages of 9 months to 19 months. All gone. I was devastated. It was like our house burned down, but none of the replaceable things were lost.

(We tried everything to recover the data. After sending it off to a company that does data recovery, we were told that they'd have to microscopically extract 1's and 0's to get anything off the plates.)

I was completely demoralized. Why bother making a scrapbook that can never be complete? Why take pictures if they'll get wiped off the hard drive in a moment?

(Since then, we back up both computers to en external hard drive on a monthly basis at the least. We have e-mail reminders set up to help us keep on that schedule.)

In the last 3 years, I have been to about 3 scrapbook nights. Before this past Friday night, I know it had been at least 18 months since I had even seen my scrapbooks. (I'll give myself a little break on this last year - we moved, and I've had lots of other projects on my plate.)

Thankfully, after over 2 years since the tragic event, I got the bug to work on the scrapbooks again. I know in the end I'll be glad to have whatever I can pull together for Little Girl's book, rather than nothing, or a half done book. Since Friday night, I brought my stuff home, and got it all out, and cranked out 14 pages. I finally used up all the pictures I had printed from eons ago.

In Little Girls' book, she's 6 months old. She'll be 4 years old in less than 2 months. And in Big Girl's book, she's nearly 3 years old. She's nearing 6 and a half in real life. I'm not quite to the gap in my pictures yet. I'm really dreading that still, but I know I'll press through it. What's done is done. The past is the past. I am accepting that and moving on.

The cool thing now is that I've gone through the pictures I had printed, so I can either print more pictures and go on as before, or go digital. I think I'm going to do a little of both. Once I finish Big Girl's third year, her books will be digital from then on. I may go digital with Little Girl's books now. I can do some nice things with 8" x 8" books. Hubby would probably rather I go digital. There's no mess...

Last night I finished my last scrapbook page at 12:15 AM, and then I packed everything up and put it all away in the closet, which took another 30-40 minutes. I didn't get to bed until so very late... I'm really paying for it today. At least the work is done and the mess is gone.

The song in my head right now, for no apparent reason, is The Beatles', "Another Girl."