As I've mentioned before, the main reason I began this blog was to journal about our journey from staging our house, putting it on the market, selling it, to buying a fixer-upper and remaking our new house into a home and sharing it with all of you.
God had other plans. Every door seemed to close. So...we changed our game plan.
We are now updating our 11 year old house (I know it's not that old) and making it our "NEW" old home.
Today, we spent the day unpacking things that we packed away for staging purposes over a year ago.
IT'S LIKE CHRISTMAS MORNING!!!!!!
Now, I just have to figure out what to do with all my "NEW" old presents!
I found baskets and vases and pictures and pitchers, and albums, albums and more photo albums.
I absolutely love photo albums. I love that when you open them, the kids come running and want to look at them, too. They bring back memories and good stories to pass along.
I first started seriously scrapbooking about 15 years ago. I went to my first Creative Memories party and I was hooked!
I began with Son #3's baby book. Then I made a birthday album for the LOML. Then a Christmas album of how we celebrate each Christmas. I tried to keep up with each child's school year but I failed terribly!!
When I was introduced to digital photo books, the scrapbooking stuff went BU-BYE!!!!! I've been doing the photo books ever since. I've done Son #1's high school photo book, Son #2's middle school and high school book, Son #3's middle school book, and Son #4's elementary school book. I've also done a Disney vacation book that the girls look through like it's a fairy tale book...except they are the princesses!!
My favorite album I made for my sister (and, of course, I made a copy for myself!). I called it the Heritage Album. It tells the story of our family tree from our grandparents all the way down to our children.
When I told a couple of my uncles that I was making the Heritage Album, they were wonderful about sending me pictures of my parents and grandparents when they were young. I didn't have any pictures of them when they were children. It was so neat to see the black and white pictures for the first time. One of my uncles who visited Ireland where my family is from and he took a picture of the tombstone of one of my great great grandfathers. He sent it to me. So I put that in the book then I found this wonderful poem to go with it.
I received a picture of my grandmother and her twin sister and I just cried because they were so beautiful.
I had fun reading through poems and sayings to sprinkle through the pages of pictures. I can't read through this album without a tear or two!
Pictures of my parents that I had never seen before.
My absolute favorite picture of my dad. He was a medic in the Korean War. I had never seen the pictures on the right until I started making this album.
I found this beautiful poem about children so I wanted to put it right before my parents having kids. You can't understand what your parents were feeling when they began having children until you begin having children yourself. This poem touched me because at the time I was making this book, my oldest son was graduating high school and going away to college. A VERY emotional time for me!
Pictures of all my siblings and me
Our family pictures
Each of our wedding pictures and invitations. YES, I kept every invitation for all four weddings and I even had my mom and dad's wedding invitation. I KEEP EVERYTHING!!
I gave each of the grandkids (our kids) a page with a baby picture, an elementary school picture and then a present picture.
I also gave a page to each of the people in our family that have passed away with a nice write-up of the wonderful things they did in our family.
I think my sister cried when I gave it to her. She usually doesn't cry. I'm the cry baby of the family and I cried looking through it.
My goal for my photo albums is to be able to finish a baby, elementary school, middle school, and high school book for each of my kids and give the books to them when they go away to college. What's great about the digital photo books is I can make a copy for them and a copy for me. There AIN'T NO WAY I'm going to make two scrapbook albums for each of us. That's WAY TOO MUCH work!!
What do y'all do with your pictures?
Hope you enjoyed your weekend!
