I’m back from the rush of the holidays, physically at least and I have something to show you. I want to share a Christmas gift I received from my parents, but really it was my mom that put it together. Both my brother and I received two scrapbook albums with layouts including all of our professional photos.
That’s right, every photo that was taken of us from birth to Kindergarten all the way to law school graduation.
This gift meant a lot to me for so many reasons. 1. My mom put a lot of time into gathering all of these photos and scrapbooking them. 2. My family has gotten a kick out of looking at my photos over the years and, let’s be honest, the hairdos that accompany them. 3. It validates for me that we don’t have to have it all done now while we’re in the thick of raising our family.
I know that you never know how long you have on this earth and you can’t put off everything until tomorrow, but we put so much pressure on ourselves to stay caught up that we stop enjoying the process of documenting our memories. I’m going to be 40 in 2015 (I have mixed feelings about this but that’s a whole separate post) and my mom has just recently had the time to work on this project. And that’s okay. I probably appreciate it more now than if she had done this when I was 20. She’s kept everything safely stored all of this time so if she hadn’t gotten these albums made we would still have the photos but I’m glad that she took the time to put them together for us.
I have such a hard time remembering that while I’m busy with our everyday life that I am not going to be able to get to all of the projects that I would like. It is very unlikely that I will catch up with all that I want to document about my kids’ lives. I do have a box where I put their photos though and if I don’t get around to it now there will be opportunities in the future to make this a bigger priority if that is still one of my goals. If not, they’ll have this lovely box of photos to look through with their kids someday.
No matter what projects you have on your to do list, do the ones that you will bring you the most enjoyment whether it is for you to keep or you plan to give it away as a gift. Take heart that the memories you are keeping and documenting will be loved by the people who love you. Memory keeping matters.
