ABCs of ME-L

Is for Layout.

Once upon a time I was a scrapbooker. All my spare crafty time was spent scr apping our family photos. The good, the bad, the ugly- it all got scrapbooked. About the time our littles were born I got out the habit of scrapbooking every photo we took and out of the habit of taking photos at all, and more in the habit of taking care of the kids. I know my family would beg to differ about the takig pics part since I am rarely without camera, but I really do take less pictures. Till I started blogging that is.

This week the kids have been pulling out my scrapbooks and for the first time they sat down and looked through them all, pointing out family members they knew, and then in their books and the vacation pictures, themselves. Watching my little ones get excited over seeing their parents, aunts and uncles, friends in scrapbooks made me realise that this is a habit I really need to take up again. If not for me definitely for them, which is who I had been telling myself I was scrapping for in the first place.

It's funny how digital cameras which were supposed to make scrapbooking easier for some only made it harder for me. Sure I could delete the crappy pictures, but that only left me with hundreds of good pictures. Cute pictures. Sweet pictures. Of the same thing. When Monkey was a baby I took about 10 pictures of him playing in the laundry basket. One was him playing in the baslet in the living room, one of him playing the basket in his room, one of him playing with the basket with a silly face. You get the idea.

If I was shooting in film I would have taken the one picture and then told the story that he would play in the basket all the time. For some reason digital made it possible for me to take that same picture everytime my kid did it and because each picture was cuter than the last I would not know which one to get rid of and since it didn't cost anything to store I just kept them all.

And so it went for every stage of Monkey's babyhood. I have 10 pictures of everything and couldn't seem to dump any of them. "Yes, honey, we need all 50 of those pictures of Monkey sucking on his socks, it shows that he did it everyday for a month." "No, don't delete those pictures of him with both legs on one leg of his footie pajamas, we need all of them.

Thankfully I did eventually go over it and weed out the repeats, (It was easy once I found a pic of Monkey chewing socks in the laundry basket. That probably allowed me to delete at least 80 pictures) but I still haven't scrapbooked any of it. I want to now that I know how much my kids like it. I probably have more picture weeding to do though.

Comments

[Chara Michele]

I have never gotten into scrapbooking, but I can totally relate to taking tons of photos... :) There are actually some pretty cool services out there on the internet that allow you to print your photos into book format. Not as wonderful as a handmade scrapbook, but still pretty neat. (I plan on doing that someday since I don't think I will ever take up scrapbooking.)

[Doe]

I do the same thing. Pretty soon I'm going to need a bigger storage for my pics.
Anyhoo, darling little angels! Cute, cute, cute!!!

[Bren]

Welcome to Typepad,
I am glad your here, I was just checking out your goodies at flicker and it took me about 1 hour to figure out how to add you as a contact.
I am Bren btw, I love your creativity and I am your new stalker :)
J/K but not really.
Your my new inspiration.

check out my blog and cya soon,
Bren :)

http://benzy55.typepad.com/my_weblog/

[Sonya]

Ah the digital photography dilemma - I take more photos than I used to, but are they developed? Not any more than they did when I took photos with film. It was great taking photos with you today, I think I got some good ones!