My scrapbooking pledge (to myself).

I’m sure only a few of you will appreciate this (or even read all the way to the bottom), but after going to last night’s crop, and I FORGOT TO TAKE ADHESIVE (it’s kind of important if you want the pictures to stay on the pages), I realized that my “scrapbooking” is just really discombobulated right now (as is much of my life, but say la vee (I do not know how to spell that in French – sue me)).

I’ve decided that I need to organize my brain with a bunch of this stuff. So, here are some “resolutions” for my scrapbooks.

1. I’m going to finish Brendan’s First Year album (really almost done with that, so I’m excited to cross that off soon!). Matthew has one and likes to look at it, so it's a good idea (I do a layout of each month in their first year. A simple idea, really, and yet, I go crazy not knowing what to scrapbook after their first year?! I feel like "Cathy": AAUUGGGHH!!!).

2. Keep up with each boy’s “Portraits” albums -- professional photos from birthdays, holidays, etc. – I’ve already started this, so again, easy to try to keep up with. AND, the 8x10 photos will allow for easy page completion, so BONUS!

3. Do a School album for each of the boys. Of course, Brendan doesn’t have one yet, but I hope to have a layout for each of their years in school, with an official entire class photo and hopefully, beginning-of-year and end-of-year questionnaires, with their “favorites”, handprints (or tracing), and a drawing.

4. Holiday albums. I used to think that people who made Halloween albums were weird (esp. that one lady at our B&B crop, but she was weird anyway), but it makes sense to me now b/c you can just throw a layout of their costumes/trick-or-treating into the same book and move on with your life. Same goes for Christmas: hopefully, layouts with pictures of each child and their favorite gift, a picture w/Santa, and who knows what else. Maybe I’ll even do a Birthday book too. Lord knows I have plenty of empty albums up there in the FROG, just waiting to be given a J.O.B.

5. And any extra layouts that include both (or more) children will be in the Family album. These pages will include trips to the zoo, beach, Easter egg hunts, whatever. If they really want these books/layouts when they grow up, we’ll deal with it then (who knows, maybe there will be some amazing technology to address this). But for now, I’m not making a bunch of pages that are doubles of other pages I’ve made. And I have stacks of pictures that are for “Matthew’s box” and “Brendan’s box” and I usually only do something w/one of the same picture, so it’s a waste to have the extras. I digress.

Finally, to try to catch up with all of these books, I’m going to just have to do several layouts of Matthew “over the years”. That is, he’s been to the strawberry patch for the past three years, and he’ll go again this year, so we’ll compile all of those pics into one layout (for the Family book).
I know that I’m not the first person to come up with this kind of idea, but I needed to have it in print. Kara and I were talking about it today (okay, “chatting”), and I said that I needed to write down all of my “plans”, and she suggested the blog. So, if you’ve read this far and haven’t given up yet, thanks for reading.

Oh, and where will all of these albums live, you ask? Hopefully, in the IKEA Expedit bookshelf that is dying to live in our living room, behind the loveseat. The books will fit perfectly in there. BUT, we have to get a minivan first b/c I am not paying $125 for them to ship a $90 bookshelf to me. OY.