Scrapbooking the 1st Year of Life…

I didn’t believe my cousin when she said, “Good luck keeping up with all that scrapbooking when you have your second kid.” I thought no way, I love to scrapbook. I will dutifully fulfill my motherly duty and scrapbook just as insanely as I did with Jillian. Fast forward to today as I am typing this blog entry. Vincent’s birthday is a little under a month away and I don’t even have one photo of my son anywhere in my house (take that back… I have the creepy Easter Bunny picture on the CD cabinet). It isn’t that I don’t want to scrapbook. Actually, quite the opposite. I want to scrapbook but I just don’t have the time to sit and figure out what pictures I want printed. When you had a roll of film you brought it to the store and 1 hour later you got your pictures back (1/2 of which were crap). Now you have an unlimited amount of picture taking capability and you can delete immediately the ones you don’t want so you know they are all good (unless your husband gets the camera and takes random shots of the ceiling).

Scrapbooking is much harder now. Why? Because you want to scrapbook all 1,000 photos, not just the 4 good photos you got with the roll of film. It takes me days to figure out what photos I want to print, and that is what my problem is. I want them all. I want to scrapbook every photo I have taken this past year and since I have close to 1,000 photos it makes it impossible to pick my favorite photos. I have been known to pick way too many photos of one event (e.g. Easter 2008) and have 12 pages of Easter related photos. (By the time I was done with that page I was so sick of bunnies and eggs.)

I know some of you are probably thinking I am being over dramatic in my description, but I don’t think I am. I treat every scrapbook page like a work of art (okay, that is being overly dramatic). I treat it like a project… a nice simple, relaxing project (expect when you are on page 11 of Easter stuff). I want it to be something special for my kids so they can show their kids what I did for them. Jillian loves to look at her scrapbooks and tells me that I need to work on Vincent’s scrapbook (almost daily), but I guess a part of me doesn’t really want to see how much my baby has grown up. Maybe (hopefully) I will be able to do this before his party because I was able to do it for Jillian and I think it is only fair to do it for him, too.

Maybe this is my way of rebelling that my baby is turning one, this is supposed to be a happy time, but I am saddened by the fact he is growing up so fast. I am proud of him but I am also saddened with every little step he takes towards independence because I know someday soon my baby won’t need mommy’s help any more (and with that last line I am going to find something sweet and stuff my face because it is to early for alcohol).