HELP!!! My Scrapbook Is Haunting Me!!!

It’s 1:30 in the morning and I’m still up! Why? Well, one, my friend from Alaska just called (again…I need to get her a clock that shows both her time and my time), to ask if I had seen some report out about acupuncture and infertility… “urm, no Andy..Think I could call you back at a more reasonable hour?”*Luv Ya AndyWho*) but even before the phone rang I was laying in bed unable to turn my little brain off. What important issue was weighing so heavily on my mind that I couldn’t drift off to a peaceful sleep getting the rest I need to be able to face my preschool class in the morning without caffeine? It must have been something important like solving the hunger of children in the remote areas of North Korea, or maybe weighing the issues that will help me decide who my candidate will be in the election, maybe something so earth shattering as the question of what type of man I am raising my little boy to become.

Nope. I couldn’t sleep because of a dumb scrapbook! I have been into stamping and card making pretty much since we were pregnant with Joey back in Virginia. I have made wedding announcements for my sister, Horse themed Christmas cards for my parents, baby announcements for my own little guy, thank you cards for all sorts of thing and so many other types of cards that the list could go on and on. Did I spend one single night stressing over any of these projects? No, I doubt the subject even entered my mind when I crawled into bed those nights. Now I have decided to cross over and get serious doing scrapbooking and I can’t turn my brain off. After uploading our digital pictures to an online photo printing site (the pictures that are developed here on base kind of stink in quality) I started to look through them and picking out my favorites of Joey growing up. As I came across what has to be my favorite. It is just a simple one. Joey is outside, standing in front of his “garden” as he called it, back in Virginia wearing his cute overalls. As I looked at the picture and remembered the day I took it, I remembered just why I was looking at this picture….I was planning to scrapbook it. I started to feel anxious and overwhelmed; I was just about having a panic attack over a simple scrapbook layout! What if I was unable to make it just right? Something that didn’t detract from my precious little farmer Joe but also was didn’t leave me looking at it later thinking, “Gee, this just seems to be missing something.” What if I put all this work into it and hated it! What if 5 years from now I looked back at the page and felt ashamed at how lacking in technique or creativity my scrapbooking was “back then”. How can I make sure the journaling is complete enough that 15 years from now I can look back at it and remember the day and the feelings that this day still gives me as clearly as it is in my mind now? Where do I begin? What should I use? Who’s perspective should the journaling be done from? What if I get it all wrong?...And on and on go the thoughts in my brain until I am ready to take my patterned papers, ribbon and adhesive and toss it out the window into the wet snow below our balcony.

Yes, I know it’s just a scrapbook. But it isn’t. Maybe I need to just start with the pictures I just kind of like. Then maybe I won’t find myself staring at my dark bedroom ceiling at 1:30 in the morning.