Author: 
To hear a first time mom say that she will never scrapbook might strike you as a little odd… but bear with me here.
My first child came into our family four months ago.
Since then hundreds of pictures have been snapped on phone and camera alike. They’ve been posted on Facebook, texted, and emailed amongst friends and family.
Even before he was born I had this idea that “someday” I would create an epic scrapbook of his first year with all these great pictures…
Now, he’s only four months old, but already I was beginning to experience this mounting guilt that I hadn’t started his first scrapbook yet.
Every time I would go to the craft store I would see the pre-made pages with spaces for “Baby’s First…” everything.
And the guilt would build.
I found myself trying to decide what theme to go with, what size book to choose, which moments to highlight, and which few pictures to use.
I thought of all the baby and toddler pictures of my husband, whose mother doesn’t scrapbook… All those pictures just sitting in shoe boxes… and I knew I didn’t want my sweet boy’s pictures to suffer the same fate.
I thought of my childhood photos, and while my mom DOES scrapbook, and while each of us kids (there are 3) has one scrapbook of pictures from our whole lives… Most of our pictures are in shoe boxes too.
I wondered, if a person like my mom who loves to scrapbook can’t keep up with the demands of the hobby, what hope is there for me?
After all, having a baby is hard enough without a hobby that is so stress inducing! I mean, shouldn’t hobbies be fun, at least on some level?
So I made a decision.
I am never going to scrapbook.
Now I know I just said I didn’t want all these memories shoved into a box… So what am I going to do instead, you ask?
I’m going to upload pictures to somewhere like Walgreens.com every few months, pick them up an hour later, spend five minutes placing them chronologically into a pre-made album from Michael’s, and then have them available to enjoy for a lifetime.
By making this decision I have set myself free!
I will never again feel guilty about “not getting around to making a scrapbook” for his first year. Or his first birthday. Or our first family vacation…
I will never again feel the pressure inadvertently placed on me by those friends and family members who scrapbook of having to keep up with their creativity…
I will never have piles of precious memories sitting in boxes in a closet…
I will save A TON of money not buying scrapbooking supplies…
And I will forever have these pictures to cherish.
Because honestly… Are these pictures of my beautiful boy any less precious because they’re not surrounded by coordinating paper, ribbons, and 3d stickers??
I think not.
Ah…here I am… the guilty mother-in-law with boxes of pictures. They are not SHOEBOXES…they are at least boxes I bought at Hobby Lobby and labeled with which child whose pictures they are. But I agree with Victoria. I found the idea of scrapbooking to be attractive, but daunting… so I never tried. Victoria and I went to Michaels on my last visit to buy albums! She made me one of her sweet baby too! Looking forward to getting those pictures in albums.