Intro to My World

I am a SAHM and a fanatic scrapbooker! Well, maybe fanatic is too strong of a word. But I do LOVE to do it and try to get to it every chance I can. HOWEVER, I also have a little 3 yr. old boy who I DO need to spend time with on occasion! So, my time is fairly minimal now. When I was married with no kiddo, I could just stay up half the night, or send my Honey Lumps off for a day of hiking and just srap to my heart's content. Not so much now though! But that is okay. More of my time is spent making the memories that I will scrapbook later!!

WHY do I scrapbook? Well, it is so much fun to go back through the books and re-live things and see where I have been, but even more than that, it combines my love of photography of all things, with my passion to create and all in all, it is just plain therapeutic to me. A wonderful stress reliever, if you will.

HOW LONG have I been doing this? Well, if I think back, I think I made my first scrapbook when I was just out of high school. I had gone on an exchange program where I spent that summer in Switzerland, working in a restaurant. When I returned I had all these photos taken with my totally cool Minolta 110 camera, (CRAZY TINY negatives came from that thing). They were so neato I just thought I should put them in a book. I had collected all kinds of memorabilia from all the travels of that summer and I used colored pencils and embellished the fire out of that book, totally ahead of my time!!! (HAHAHA)

Anyway, while I was looking at some of my current stuff and e-mailing with friends around the world about this beloved art form, it occurred to me that this would be a cool way to share with friends near and far, ideas and such. I love seeing what others do with their albums and am eager to snatch amazing ideas from fellow srappers. I also love to pass those ideas on to others if I can. SOOOOOO...this will be my attempt to share as I create. I want to post some of my early stuff (unfortunately that wonderful Switzerland Album did not stand the test of time. It has basically disintegrated and that is a bummer indeed). I will post as I work too.

Which brings me to my conclusion. I have decided to make a goal for this year. I am about a year and a few months behind right now. Long story short, I have set my sights on finishing the rest of our 2006 album, our 2007 album and our China Album. (We adopted from China in Oct. 2006) So here is how I began to tackle that goal. I uploaded all my chosen photos pertinent to those albums, to my photo place on line. They were having a pre-paid print sale, which I promptly took advantage of, and ordered every stinkin' one of those 1,200 or so pics!! YIKES!! I then organized them by date, even wrote down ideas of the page layouts with stickers I have and then set everything up on a table off in a corner of the house. It is a bit messy, but now when I get a 30 minute or more block of time free, I sit down and work for a bit. So far so good. Keeping the balance as far as not doing it too much and letting my other calling (motherhood/wife) slack!! Okay, I will finish for now and get some pics on here.