To Blog or Not To Blog
Before I ever became a mom, I learned about the creativity of scrapbooking and fell in love. I couldn't wait to have events and children and memories to record in books to treasure for years to come. I made books of high school pictures and had a sorority scrapbook in college and I still enjoy looking at (and laughing at!) the memories I recorded.
I thought that it would be so much easier to incorporate memory keeping into my job as a mom. When we had Jaden, it wasn't too bad because it was easy to leave one child home with Daddy on an occasional Friday night to work on her book. Once I became pregnant with Sienna it became harder and now with three little girls running around, my head spends more time spinning than I ever could scrapbooking!
For me, scrapbooking is 50% about the photos and 50% about the stories and words one shares about those photos. When time to scrapbook became harder to find, I turned to blogging. For a few years this blog was my outlet--my way to record some things about my girls, my way to connect with a few other blogging mamas (some in real life friends and others who I connected with through our mutual enjoyment of blogging). In 2009 and 2010 I tried all I could to make this virtual scrapbook work for my memory keeping.
When Bristol arrived, I wasn't able to make the time as much to sit down and blog. It's quite a process of uploading photos from camera to computer, selecting which to use for blog, exporting those from my memory manager software, uploading those to the blogger site and then writing prose to accompany the photos. And let's be honest, I've never been short on words. Though I love to write, it takes a lot of time and thinking! I still did as much as I could though and even got monthly posts put together about Bristol for 11 straight months. Those posts are now in a physical book that I will enjoy forever and ever. It's filled with milestones and emotions about my baby girl, who, it appears, will always be the baby of this family (boo!).
Aside from Bristol's first year book though, I've never been able to create books from this blog. I've always felt there would be holes in the books from important memories and photos left out of the blog when I didn't have time to sit down to update, etc. I take THOUSANDS of photos of my girls each year--posed photos, family outings, school events, preschool parents group events, special moments in our home, birthdays, holidays, and so on. It's a big job to go through ALL of those digital photos to post them, write about them and then incorporate them into books. And when one big event or story gets missed, I am SO hard on myself and don't want it left out of the memory book of that year regardless of whether it hit the www. So where has all of this left us? Many half-done scrapbooks and one frustrated mama!
I know that I need to let go a little and that not every single digital photo we take or every memory we may can possibly be printed / recorded / posted / etc. So I have spent quite a lot of time recently trying to figure out where to go from here. Do I close this blogging chapter of our lives and focus on printing photos and making traditional scrapbooks like I started to when Jaden was a baby? Or do I make this a priority, try to blog as much as possible, and in the process also create a digital albums to get photos and memories into my girls' hands for now and for later. Or, do I stop blogging and only digitally journal in my scrapbooking software? This is where I get really frustrated with what I want to do because even with all of the steps, blogging is ultimately easier than traditional or digital scrapbooking, and can be the perfect first step towards digital family albums, but I haven't even been able to make time for blogging much this year! Ugh!
Now that I'm frustrated and confused in my own thoughts about this all over again, and I've probably confused anyone reading this, I guess I am back at square one. My point of today is that I'm very unsure about the future of this blog, about where I want to go from here. My heart aches for an hour in my days to record family memories whether it be via scrapbooking, blogging, or pen and paper. I know I want to do something. I know I NEED to do something.
My dad passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly when I was 16 and I absolutely CHERISH the albums he left me and the few written things I have from him. This probably has a huge impact on why taking photos and recording memories is of utmost importance to me. I want my kids to know 5, 10, 20 years from now how much they have meant to me and how much fun we have had together. I hope to be here with them for years to come of course, but I won't be able to remember all of the little things or the meaning behind the photos we take, so I need to record things now.
I am going to figure out what I want to do for 2013 this week and my most important New Year's Resolution will be to keep up with whatever system I choose. Have any of you ever dealt with the struggle to record memories and finding the time to do so? Or figuring out the best way to do so--blogging, scrapbooking, journaling on paper? I am open to all suggestions, opinions and feedback :)
I thought that it would be so much easier to incorporate memory keeping into my job as a mom. When we had Jaden, it wasn't too bad because it was easy to leave one child home with Daddy on an occasional Friday night to work on her book. Once I became pregnant with Sienna it became harder and now with three little girls running around, my head spends more time spinning than I ever could scrapbooking!
For me, scrapbooking is 50% about the photos and 50% about the stories and words one shares about those photos. When time to scrapbook became harder to find, I turned to blogging. For a few years this blog was my outlet--my way to record some things about my girls, my way to connect with a few other blogging mamas (some in real life friends and others who I connected with through our mutual enjoyment of blogging). In 2009 and 2010 I tried all I could to make this virtual scrapbook work for my memory keeping.
When Bristol arrived, I wasn't able to make the time as much to sit down and blog. It's quite a process of uploading photos from camera to computer, selecting which to use for blog, exporting those from my memory manager software, uploading those to the blogger site and then writing prose to accompany the photos. And let's be honest, I've never been short on words. Though I love to write, it takes a lot of time and thinking! I still did as much as I could though and even got monthly posts put together about Bristol for 11 straight months. Those posts are now in a physical book that I will enjoy forever and ever. It's filled with milestones and emotions about my baby girl, who, it appears, will always be the baby of this family (boo!).
Aside from Bristol's first year book though, I've never been able to create books from this blog. I've always felt there would be holes in the books from important memories and photos left out of the blog when I didn't have time to sit down to update, etc. I take THOUSANDS of photos of my girls each year--posed photos, family outings, school events, preschool parents group events, special moments in our home, birthdays, holidays, and so on. It's a big job to go through ALL of those digital photos to post them, write about them and then incorporate them into books. And when one big event or story gets missed, I am SO hard on myself and don't want it left out of the memory book of that year regardless of whether it hit the www. So where has all of this left us? Many half-done scrapbooks and one frustrated mama!
I know that I need to let go a little and that not every single digital photo we take or every memory we may can possibly be printed / recorded / posted / etc. So I have spent quite a lot of time recently trying to figure out where to go from here. Do I close this blogging chapter of our lives and focus on printing photos and making traditional scrapbooks like I started to when Jaden was a baby? Or do I make this a priority, try to blog as much as possible, and in the process also create a digital albums to get photos and memories into my girls' hands for now and for later. Or, do I stop blogging and only digitally journal in my scrapbooking software? This is where I get really frustrated with what I want to do because even with all of the steps, blogging is ultimately easier than traditional or digital scrapbooking, and can be the perfect first step towards digital family albums, but I haven't even been able to make time for blogging much this year! Ugh!
Now that I'm frustrated and confused in my own thoughts about this all over again, and I've probably confused anyone reading this, I guess I am back at square one. My point of today is that I'm very unsure about the future of this blog, about where I want to go from here. My heart aches for an hour in my days to record family memories whether it be via scrapbooking, blogging, or pen and paper. I know I want to do something. I know I NEED to do something.
My dad passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly when I was 16 and I absolutely CHERISH the albums he left me and the few written things I have from him. This probably has a huge impact on why taking photos and recording memories is of utmost importance to me. I want my kids to know 5, 10, 20 years from now how much they have meant to me and how much fun we have had together. I hope to be here with them for years to come of course, but I won't be able to remember all of the little things or the meaning behind the photos we take, so I need to record things now.
I am going to figure out what I want to do for 2013 this week and my most important New Year's Resolution will be to keep up with whatever system I choose. Have any of you ever dealt with the struggle to record memories and finding the time to do so? Or figuring out the best way to do so--blogging, scrapbooking, journaling on paper? I am open to all suggestions, opinions and feedback :)
Comments
I keep blogging because it lets me record most of the important events in our lives and when I have the time to sit down and actually make a scrapbook, I can use my blog as a reference for dates/events/milestones.
Whatever you decide to do, I hope you will still post on your blog now and then. Although, I love seeing your updates on FB too!