Pictures

I didn't budge outside the house today.  Instead, I started a project that I've been talking about getting to for weeks.  Started - not finished.  That's the way I am with a lot of things.  But I digress.

I have thousands of pictures.  It seems I've become, unofficially, the keeper of the family's pictures.  When my sister moved Mum from her home in Nova Scotia to Winnipeg so that she could take care of her until her Alzheimer's made it necessary to move her into a care facility, she gave me all of Mum's photo albums.  I think Wendy might even have slipped one or two of her own in there too.  So I have all those, besides the dozens of my own, plus all the pictures I've been taking in the past few years because the scrapbooker in me insists that I record every activity of every member of the family so I can scrapbook them.  I don't print them all of the digital ones out, thank goodness, but they're all recorded on my desktop computer (which is in the process of crashing as we speak), my laptop, my iPad, and an external drive.

So, I piled all the pictures from my scrapbook room onto my dining room table and started sorting them.  Well, of course, I got caught up in just looking at the pictures and remembering the fun times.  As I was sorting, I wrote names and dates on the back of all of them.  And I'm embarrassed to admit that some of the babies were hard to identify.  I mean, come on, they're babies!  I can usually identify my seven kids as babies, but when it comes to the 20 grandkids it's a bit tougher.  I find I look at the backgrounds to see what furniture is in the picture, who else is in it with the baby, what house they're in, what clothes the infant has on, etc.  and can usually identify them that way.  Of course, most of them have distinguishing characteristics at an early age but all but two of them were bald and/or blond, and all but two have blue eyes.  I really didn't get too far with my sorting but I left everything out so I can get back to it tomorrow.

Pictures on the dining room table

The scrapbooking table - six feet long

 I won't scrapbook all the pictures - I'd have to live to be 163 to do that, and have my eyesight and memory intact!  But the best and/or most interesting ones will get done.  I'm putting the finished layouts in albums by family so that when I'm no longer here each of my kids will be able to take their albums and see how much their mother loved them and their children.  That's my plan anyway.  Here are some of the layouts I've done lately.

Jenny's son, Sam

Amy's daughter, Sydney

Amy's daughter, Kenzie

Lloyd and me with Mary's kids, Baron and Layla

Mary's daughter, Layla

Butterflies at the Butterfly Pavilion at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix, AZ

On Friday I'll be scrapbooking all day and into the evening with Mickey - it's been over two weeks since we've had a scrapbooking day together so I'm really looking forward to it.  I get more done and stay focussed when I have someone to scrapbook with.  Mickey and I met at a scrapbooking event six or seven years ago and have been scrapping together ever since.

But tomorrow I have to do more organizing.