Philosophy of Scrapbooking

The danger in asking your children what you should write about on your blog is that no matter what they suggest, you sort of have to follow up on it. They chose their scrapbooks.
Around the time our oldest was born, the Creative Memories craze was at it's peak in our area. And like the dutiful new Mom that I was, I allowed myself to be sucked into the frenzy. I attended one of the parties and left feeling grateful that I did not have a huge backlog of pictures that needed attention. I purchased and cropped and layered and filled a good sized album with really incredible pages. And then I came to my senses. Yes, some of those pages were unbelievably fun or beautiful. But some of them only contained one or two actual pictures. I also started noticing that my fun and beautiful pages looked almost identical to the other moms fun and beautiful pages. We were, after all, attending the same "crop camps". And was eating peas for the first time really a milestone that needed to be celebrated with a double page spread?
Yeah, that what I thought too.




So very quickly my philosophy of scrapbooking changed. I started doing fast pages with lots of photos on them and a few quick accent stickers, or a cute, slightly more work, punched border. I borrowed ideas from the Punch Art books, or came up with my own. And surprise! The albums looked more unique and became more about the pictures of my girls and less about the decorations.

Then we had our second child; one who didn't entertain herself quietly with books for hours on end. And my scrapbooking philosophy changed once again...