The Birthday Scrapbook Project

I have been busier than a hive full of bees for the past couple of weeks. It's hard to explain why. Nothing too earthshaking has been happening, just a lot of "stuff" to do at work and home (projects, paperwork, cleaning, syllabus writing, etc.) and all of it seeming to come in a flurry of have-to-get-done-immediately-if-not-sooner. Hence my lack of much time to blog.

June promises to be yet another busy month, though I hope to have at least a little time for some creativity (among other things, my poem a day idea for May fell by the wayside relatively early on into the month...urgh). One project I've barely begun, but have a definite deadline for, is the sweet girl's birthday scrapbook.

I am not a huge scrapbooking gal. But I love making cards and paper collages, so the notion of making an attractive scrapbook has some real appeal. I got the idea to create a birthday scrapbook for S. sometime last year when it dawned on me how woefully inadequate I have been as a chronicler of her babyhood, toddlerhood and early childhood. Yes, I've written a lot about her, that's true, but none of it is in one easily accessible place (it's mostly in e-mails to family, some of which are on a computer that's not been used/accessed for a few years). I started two separate baby books when I was pregnant with her, workbook type keepsakes given to me as gifts, neither of which I ever finished filling in or actually glued pictures in. I have a scrapbook I put together with a lot of the cards people gave us when she was born, and I have two boxes full of photographs in roughly chronological order from her birth onwards.

Several months ago I got the idea to put together a scrapbook where I would create a couple of pages of pictures, along with some notes, from each birthday. I bought a lovely pale pink album at a craft store, stuck it on the shelf, and promised myself I'd get to it this year -- meaning I would go ahead and create the pages for all of her birthdays so far and then show it to her right around her 5th birthday, the one coming up, and then continue to create new pages each year as the birthday comes round again.

Well, her 5th birthday is now coming up in three and a half weeks, and I've still not put the scrapbook together! I have made some headway though: I managed to gather the pictures for it. This was trickier than I expected because not all of our photo sources are in the same place either. I didn't want to use my one and only copies, so I thought I'd order extras -- which was fine for the photos taken up through her 3rd birthday, which we'd taken with a film camera and stored in an online film developing website. But then I had to go hunting for photos from the last two years which we've taken on our digital camera. I thought we had them all on our computer, but turns out that some of the earlier ones were only on CD. I had to find them all, sort them all, choose, upload the digital ones to the online ordering site that had our film photos (sometimes resizing them for best quality). It all took much longer than I planned on.

But it was worth it. The pictures came in the mail Friday, and it was such a fun experience to look through the whole set and see how much she has changed and grown from the day she was born. We have some wonderful pictures and it will be fun to arrange them attractively in the book, along with a few well-chosen (I hope) words here and there. I've begun going through all my beautiful crafting papers and even bought a few fancy birthday scrapbooking stickers. I'm not sure how much time I will have to pull this together, but I would really love to get it done before that birthday rolls around at the end of the month. We shall see!