Just Getting Started

OK.... So my friends are saying that I need to start a blog about my scrapbooking. I am not too sure about this, so please excuse me if my postings seem rather naive or simplistic. I guess that the most obvious thing to do is just get started.

Just a little bit about myself before I get to the "meat" of my story. My name is Reta, and I am married with 2 children. My husband and I just celebrated 32 years of marriage in December. Our daughter is married and has 2 beautiful children of her own. Our son is still single.

My job officially ended on Jan 4, and I have no current prospects of employment, but you never know. I work with computers - have been for more than 20 years. Ugh! I am SO trying to get out of computer support. I don't know much else, though, so I will probably return to it sometime soon. It just depends on the job market. In the meantime, though, I get to scrapbook!

I love all things scrapbooking and will take every opportunity to indulge myself in it. I am a paper junkie. I have so much paper that I could easily fill at least 50 scrapbooks, but I still find myself glancing through each new stack that I find at the stores. I love the new prints, the textures, the shapes... Oh, yeah... I am hooked.

It all started way back in 2003 when my little sister and I decided that our mother's "magnetic" scrapbooks were doing more harm than good to the photos. You know the kind of scrapbooks... those old, yellowed, sticky, gummy, not-so-gummy, peel-the-cellophane-back books. Each time we visted my mother, we carted off one or two of her albums. She had about 30 of them, so we figured that she wouldn't miss a few here and there. Our intent was to fix them, then give them back to my parents as a Christmas gift.

We carefully removed the photos from those horrific books, categorized them, identified everyone in the photos (now THERE'S a unique idea), and scrapped them with AF/LF papers and albums.

My dad was 3rd from the youngest of 13 kids, and my mother was the baby of 11. Both of their parents and many of their siblings had passed away already, and I found their obituaries, funeral cards and photos tucked away in the books that I had "pilferred." I decided to do a special photo album for each of my parents, dedicated to their family members. I even found some cousins with photos that Mom and Dad had never seen before. I did a page for each family member and included their obits and funeral cards with photos and maybe a short saying or memory about each one.

We ended up with 14 VERY full albums by Christmas. The big day came, and I was all excited about the gift. My sister and I presented the albums to my parents. They both cried when they opened their special family albums. I will never forget my mother's hushed comment when she saw a photo of her mother that she had never seen before. "That's my Mom... THAT'S my MOM!" Tears glistened in her eyes, and she softly touched the photo. In my dad's book, I had included an 8-page panoramic spread of my 16-year-old nephew who had been killed in an auto accident in 1999. It had photos from birth to the last photo taken just weeks before the accident. On the back was the obituary and funeral card. I was worried that my baby sister would be offended by the pages documenting her son's life, but instead, she said that she was honored to see the pages. My dad just sat quietly and cried. Everyone spent time going through the albums, pointing at this one or that one, remembering old times.

My sister and I spent many hours on those books, and it was well worth it. I love my parents, and my family. What better way to show it than to give honor to the images of their loved ones and the many wonderful family times through the years?

I have continued to scrap ever since then. Sometimes I do more talking than scrapping, but I do ok. Friends gather in the scrapbook room in my garage every Monday night, and we scrap, eat chocolate and talk. We have a good time.

I guess I'm done talking for now. I know, I know.... Keep the posts short and sweet. I promise that all future posts will be MUCH shorter. I just wanted to share the origin of my scrapbooking obsession.