30 Days of Gratitude 2011: Day Eighteen

I resisted the scrapbooking craze for a while. Rachael had a baby book that I vigilantly filled in with important dates and information, baby pictures and locks of hair, but I never felt compelled to scrapbook anything...until a good friend started scrapping. She came over one day with a ginormous bag full of scrapping equipment, and helped me make my very first scrapbook page. It was basic and not very pretty, but it was fun. So I started scrapbooking too.


It wasn't long before I had my own ginormous bag full of scrap goodies, paper piled to my knees, stickers and brads and sequins and flowers - and an album full to overflowing of pages that I was quite proud of.


Then Milly came along. With a newborn in the house, I just didn't have the time or the energy to drag out aaaaaall of that stuff every time the mood to scrap hit me. Even if I had gotten it all out during one of her naps, there was no way she would sleep long enough to let me finish a page and clean it all up again.


I had heard of people that did "digital scrapbooking" - making their pages in Photoshop (or a similar program), printing them, and putting them in the scrapbook. This just seemed wrong to me. Scrapbook pages needed layers, depth, texture.


But then Milly turned one. And I realized that I hadn't created one single page of her life. Not one.


That's when I decided that maybe I'd give this digital scrapbooking thing a try after all.

I already had Photoshop, and used it often to edit my pictures. How hard could digi scrapping be? I downloaded a few free kits (paper and embellishments) and got to work.


My first few pages were, admittedly, not very good. There is definitely a learning curve. But I kept practicing, looked at other people's pages, and scrapped, scrapped, scrapped. I scrapped holidays...

...I scrapped big events, like dances...

...I scrapped the little things, like a cute moment in Old Navy.

Heck, I even scrapped breakfast.

I scrapped EVERYTHING. Everything important, sweet, funny, or that I just plain didn't want to forget. I became a bit of a scrap addict - and I am grateful for it.


I'm still not good about printing them and putting them in albums. I'll get around to it someday. But for now, I have a hard drive overflowing with scrapbook pages - from before Rachael was born through the present - that my girls already love to look at. It's my hope that they'll have these as a reminder, when they're older, that their mommy cherished every single moment with them...enough to spend time documenting it for them. Their story is important to me, and it will be preserved. Maybe not in the way that I had originally intended, but in a way. I am grateful to have the tools, knowledge, and ability to scrapbook, and I love doing it for them.