Month: June 2023

I have heard and read many times you should scrapbook your everyday life as well as all those events, vacations and gatherings.  When I hear this I think “how boring, I don’t do anything special”. When you think about it, you have about 16 hours in a day, IF you are lucky enough to get 8 hours of sleep a night.  One way to do this would be to do a 3 x 3 box across the top, and bottom of a 2 page layout.  That would give you 16 blocks in which to put photos, using the center for more detail.  You might have to get some help with the picture taking (great time to show your oved one what you do all day) or use the timer setting on your phone.

Do you do specific things on specific days? Depending on your age, you remember the dishtowels our grandmother’s had that had every day of the week. You could put 7 boxes across the middle of the page and title each box for the day of the week and put a picture of what it is you do.  Here are some ideas for days of the week photos:

1. Sunday – church, football, or whatever consumes your Sundays
2. Monday – laundry… you can take a picture of the dirty mountain of laundry or the basket of folded clothes. You could even add a bit extra by mounting the photo on a 6″ x 3″ piece of cardstock folded in half. Inside you might put if kids do their own laundry or if you have a special sock sorter 🙂
3. Tuesday – do I dare say ironing these days? Not this girl, so what do you do on Tuesday, perhaps you vaccume the house after a busy weekend.
4. Wedensday – grocery shopping, take a picture of your favorite grocery isle.
5. Thursday – Do people still dust regularly? maybe this is something you have one of the kids do… take their picture doing it.
6. Friday – If you are lucky, Friday is date night. Take a picture on your next date. What else do you do on Friday so you have your weekend free?
7. Saturday – hopefully you are not stuck doing housework, but the kids have Saturday morning chores. If you have several children, get a picture of all of them working and put together as a book for this block.

Now that I have shared this idea with you, I am going to have to do a page like this myself.  Since my husband and I live with my daughter and her family, I may have to get a bit creative…. check back often to see what I may have come up with!

What are your daily/weekly things you do? Leave a comment below and share with us!

My husband has been having headaches and major pain in his head for quite some time. We keep going for tests, but only after a PET scan did I learn that my husband has Frontotemporal dementia. Why am I sharing this with you, you are wondering. One very concerning part of this dementia is that he is loosing his memory. While we wish it would affect his long-term memory (all the stuff that has happened in your life you WANT to forget) it has a more pronounced affect on his short term memory. Suddenly, memory keeping sounds much more important that just a hobby of scrapbooking.

Here is a quote I read recently, (author unknown) “Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose”. I thought it was rather profound considering at 65, I catch little blips on my memory scale.

The truth is, we never know what life is going to deal us. Scrapbooking the memories we are making today is important. I know what you are thinking, as so many people do, “the photos are in my phone.” You think they are safe, you would never delete them, at least now on purpose. Let me share with you a sad story my sister-in-law experienced. We had a big family reunion in Moab, Utah. There was a day that 5 families with their jeeps took to the trails. This included my brother and his wife, my son-in-law and his boys, and my two sons with their kids. Never before had all of them done something together like this and lots of pictures and videos were taken. They had a ball. That night, my son was telling Josie how she could share them on google photos, (Josie has an Iphone, while the rest of us are android users. So Josie uploaded all the photos in her phone to the google cloud. Then, because she didn’t realize she could just share the photos she wanted to share, she started deleting photos that were not of the trip… 8 years worth the photos were now deleted from both her Icloud AND Google Cloud. She was devastated, cried for days. Pictures going back to my nephew playing high school baseball, then for UNR, my niece’s graduation and so many family get togethers and personal vacations.

Take the time to print your photos, even if you don’t feel you have the time to scrapbook them. I will show you ways to keep those photos using instant pages that just require you slip the photo in, and a card with the details. I will also give you easy layouts you can do in less than an hour if you want something a bit more details. Just don’t let what happened to Josie happen to you. If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can back up automatically an unlimited number of photos.

I would rather sort through multiples of the same photo (which I often do) rather than try to collect from others what I have lost.

Do you have a story to tell about your photos? Leave a comment below and share your story.