Scrapbooks

I spent a great deal of Saturday scrapbooking.

I dont particularly enjoy scrapbooking. I think that its too much become the benchmark whereby young mothers measure themselves. I hate dragging everything out...cutting the pictures...matting them...writing about what is going on...remembering the details...telling the feelings. I enjoy the journaling part but I do not enjoy all the mess and the energy it takes to think out how things will look on a page.

However, I do enjoy the end product. I love that its a record of our lives.

Scrapping had just come into full fashion when the girl was born. You can totally track its popularity by how embellished her scrapbooks are. The more crap in the book...the more popular the craft was. I believe it may be on the wane, especially with the advent of Digiscrapping. (Brandi is the ultimate digiscrapper!!)

Dont get me wrong...i TRIPLE love the albums. So does the girl! I love that she has photos and stories from every phase of her life and from all the major holidays and from many days that are just "nothing" days. I love that she looks at them and we reminise. I know they will be gorgeous keepsakes for us in years to come.

Ive thought about this for sometime now. I wonder if how kids see their childhoods will be changed with all the recording devises that we now have. I have a babybook and one small album from childhood. It coveres me from babyhood until I was a teenager. There are no video tapes of me growing up. VCRS had just come out when I was in middle school. These devises were not readily avaialbe and were cost prohibitive.

What I wonder is, if the recording and video tapes and photos and scrapbooks will show a kid what his childhood was really like.

I wonder that if I had videos of my childhood would I think differently about my family? Or would what I know about them just show through on the videos? I wonder what kind of perspective all our recording devices will afford the children of today.

I was once told that one of the reasons I find joy in the journaling part of scrapbooking so much is that I want to prove it to myself that its real. I think that this is true.

I want the girl to be able to see how much we loved her...there there will never be a doubt of that...that she will be able to point to direct examples of our passion for her. This so stems back to my own disassociative issues with my mother. Its like I never want the girl to feel that she was overlooked...I want her to know that she is always special. I have so many pictures of her and me with our arms around each other. I want her to see all through her life how much she was wanted and desired and cared for and loved.

Yeah...I dont like scrapbooking, but I do love the record they leave behind...the stories they tell and the images that speak for themselves.