Recording Memories

With the start of winter break for my preteen son, I am hoping to get caught up with scrap-booking his childhood pictures with his help.  So far, there has been a lot of selling with not much buying.  I showed him the end result, some of his baby pictures in the book, and how much he would enjoy them later, how HIS kids would not like to go through a chaotic pile of pictures.

All these points, he was fine with, but the end result was that after initially organizing a few pictures by age, as requested, he wandered off to watch Jurassic Park Part III and suggested under his breath that maybe I do the scrap-booking instead.   I thought he had a point in that it is MY hobby.  He wouldn’t even know what to say next to the pictures as it is from my perspective and he wouldn’t remember what was going on in the pictures.

Still, I had hoped some artistic interest would call out to him.  I’m hoping he will get more involved when I get to an artistic part. And I just need the help as I am still trying to finish his newborn pictures.  His pictures are from a time when digital cameras were just starting to enter the scene.  They were big, clunky objects.  So everything I shot was developed, good or bad, that needs to be scrap-booked, since 1998.  ***sigh*** I dream of being done by New Year’s so that I can try to get caught up with my daughter’s book.  I don’t want to wait too long as it gets harder to figure out what to write along with the pictures.  Plus her pictures are all on the computer, so I have to first get them developed.

Then of course there are all the pictures in between, vacations and so forth. Will I ever get caught up?  I also have a birth-record cross-stitch that I started when I was expecting my son.  It is barely 1/4 done and I hope to complete it for my daughter.

I enjoy the idea of recording memories.  I picture my kids leafing through their books long after I’m gone, feeling like they have a better sense of themselves and my view of them as they were growing up.  I know I would treasure something like this, and I imagine that they would as well.  I love photography and scrap-booking my children’s lives seems like a meaningful utilization of my photographic interest.

It is possible that I’m spending way too much time and energy on recording memories rather than making them, but for now, I have to plod forward to satisfy the “Monk” (our favorite TV show about the obsessive-compulsive detective) in me.  I hope I am rewarded someday by finding much meaning and comfort in my recorded memories.