Scrapbookingopoly

I have at least three large rubbermaid containers filled with scrapbooking supplies in my garage and one in the master bedroom. They are filled to the brim with papers, stickers, stencils, embellishments, scissors, punchers, embossers, and laminators. They probably are worth more than my entire wardrobe. Possibly my house, in that they have literally taken over my house. Not the payments, but the controlling interest.

And it keeps coming in. I have three children now. I take like 45 pictures of each kid a week, have 15 more forwarded to us or texted to us every month, not to mention we attract piles of receipts, brochures, posters, mementos, art projects, hair cuttings, and Thomas the Tank Engine postcards like poop seduces flies. These things end up in piles of their own, typically piled on TOP of said scrapbooking boxes, in some random semblence of order dictated by how many kids are tantruming at that moment. Only one tantruming? Things are placed in historical order. More of a typical afternoon? Things are thrown and scattered.

At some point a young mother stops and realizes that she's not going to be the perfect mom in playgroup, who manages to do laundry, cooking, working, or cleaning, while at the same time scrapbooking each memento into albums or shadow boxes (and journaling it next to it too!). Unless she does something quickly, she's going to end up buried in mementos without her sanity much less a recorded list of what toppings Junior asked for on his pizza his first day of soccer class.

I got to that point today. It hit me that pre-scrapbooking fad, life was easy. You bound your photographs in quick-and-easy photo albums, and any leftover mementos were either boxed or glued into 'Found Books". Found Books used to be really cool and unique, but once more modern 'scrapbooking hit', it seems they died. It was a simple spiraled notebook with hard cardboard-stock paper (much harder than in scrapbooking books), where you slabbed on glue, flung on menentos, and quickly write notes and dates next to items of importance. Acid-free paper be damned. Embelishments be damned. It wasn't about pretty. It was about getting it down, hopefully in some sort of order. It took 10 minutes to memorialize seven months of time. It was awesome!

I scooped up all three children to head to our local Michael's to buy the type of book that I used to use before all of the scrapbooking fanaticism. I wanted a Found Book.

We entered the store and noticed four aisles of stickers, one of embellishments, one of organizers, one of binders, one of paper, and one of various tools. Thousands of different types of paper, stencils, metal clasps, cut-outs were out on display. But nowhere could we find what we needed. When asked, the saleslady proudly showed me the lines of scrapbooking binders, pointing out how cute we could make it with newspaper backgrounds, calligraphy, and even computer print-outs of my journaling. Why not make a separate book just in regards to one of our outings? Why not a separate book for each child in each month? Why not laminate the receipt for the zoo trip and overlay it on the park map, where we've inserted pictures of our children at each spot?

Why? Because... just no.

So, now instead of easily putting the last year into a Found Album, I get to glue and tape these objects onto some flowery themed-paper (I have NO interest in making the paper match the items or the timing of this thing) in some hogwash order as now I'm just frustrated and have lost my initial drive.

All because scrapbooking has totally taken over the world of putting memories down.

My guess is that like me, hundreds of mothers out there have piles of photos, piles of trinkets, and boxes full of scrapbooking items that are rarely opened but often criticized. My guess is that, like me, these things are never going to all be scrapbooked beautifully. Let's face it: We spend all day setting up and cleaning up and organizing, why spend our free time doing the same thing? So, these mementos will sit, un-memorialized, for months.

And now I have something to blame: Scrapbooking. Scrapbooking, in all its modern day definers (Why not freeze-dry the actual rose your child picked for you, laminate it, magnetize it, and then press it onto a cut-out of your husband's sperm's sillouette as the co-creator of your child?), has created a monopoly in regards to memory-keeping.