Preschool picture and Senior picture
Last fall, I had the first of many mini-panic attacks about Emily graduating from high school this year. Besides the expected emotions that go along with your first-born graduating, such as joy, teary-eyed pride, worry, fall-to-your-knees feelings of sadness, fear that your family will never be the same again, and too many bittersweet tears to count, I also had that horrible feeling of I've-let-her-down-and-I'll-never-forgive-myself feelings of guilt that come with being a scrapbooker.
You know the feelings. The ones that arise when you see someone's albums all lined up on their shelves, neatly labeled with every year, and they casually mention that they're "all caught up."
"Caught up." They're dirty words to me. And invoke way too much guilt for me to even put into words. I'm not a chronological scrapbooker and I've prided myself on not ever worrying about being "caught up."
But there's still a part of me that worries what my kids will think when they look through their scrapbooks. In Emily's case, she could easily have thought, "Wow, Mom cared nothing about me until I was 7-years-old, then she scrapbooked only single, enlarged photos of me for three years with a lot of heavy, metal embellishments, then she switched to digital scrapbooking and I have hundreds of layouts of every year, every single moment of my life was documented, including moments I'd rather die than see recorded on paper, I have 100 layouts of my freshman year of high school and nothing since."
I couldn't live with it. I had flashes of putting out her scrapbooks at her graduation party and getting questions from everyone about where was her babyhood and why didn't I take any pictures of her last three years of high school.
Scrapbookers' guilt overtook me, so I set a goal. It was a lofty goal, but only because I hadn't started scrapbooking until she was in first grade.
My goal was simple - have just 3-4 layouts of each year of Emily's life in her scrapbooks. Just enough to capture some big moments of her life without enormous gaps. It was meant to make me feel "caught up."
Which meant I had 30-40 layouts to do before she graduated. And I actually did it.
My friend, Bekah, is also a scrapbooker and she has helped me tremendously this year. She helped me get organized last September and we set monthly goals for getting together to scrapbook. I couldn't have done it without her motivating me to keep going.
I started with Emily's birth as my first layout and ended with her Senior Recognition as my last layout - an event that happened just one week before her graduation party. I'm not sure I've ever been more proud of a scrapbooking project than this one.
I'll have another post soon with layouts that I made this year and explain the process fully.
In the meantime, if you've got a scrapbooking project that feels too overwhelming to tackle, my mantra this year was to eat the elephant one bite at a time. And it worked. It's totally doable so start organizing!
