A frequent conversation we have at our house goes as follows:
DH: You're scrappin' that!?
me: We're going to want to remember this someday.
DH: OK
I am a firm believer in scrapping the everyday. I have two reasons for doing so:
1. I believe that my life will change enough that I will forget the details. I have firm evidence of this, as I have already forgotten lots of stuff. For example, I used to live far, far away (over a decade ago). There was a park I went to almost everyday. I loved that park. I don't have any photos of it and I've forgotten the name. Two years ago we had our awful, damaged linoleum floors removed and replaced it with tile. Recently my husband glanced at the floor and said "I've forgotten what the old floors looked like." Document, people, document. I wish I had been clever enough to take before and after photos of the floor. In process would have been a good idea too. I could have journaled about the challenges of preparing every meal with a microwave and a BBQ grill.
2. As the top of my blog states, I hope that someday future generations will be interested and amazed. Think of how much change there has been in your lifetime, big and small. I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember a time before everyone had a computer and internet access. I got my first DVR in September of last year. We are considering buying a dishwasher. I should photograph a huge pile of dishes and the spot in the kitchen where we think we'll place the dishwasher. My grandmother died a long time ago, but I used to love talking to her about her life. She remembered WWI and II and the Great Depression. I was told stories about borrowing shoes during WWII to go to town. Can you imagine not owning a pair of shoes? (Shoes were rationed, as was everything else.) I wish I had written these things down. (I'm working on a layout about my grandmother; I'll post it sometime in the future.) My point is we have no idea how different life will be when our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are adults. Document, people, document.
In the spirit of documenting the mundane details of our everyday lives, here is a two page layout that I made about finding a new "flavor" of dishsoap and unloading groceries after a trip to town. The first layout was made in response to a challenge to quote a conversation on a layout. That challenge made me walk around wondering what conversational bit I wanted to remember forever. I have many small moments in my life, of which I have a fairly clear memory, but of which I don't recall the exact words that made that moment so memorable. Document, people, document.
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Just Another Saturday. Credits: Frames: Shabby Princess, Havest Spice Fonts: CK Academia and American Typewriter |
The journaling reads:
We had just come back from running errands in Santa Fe, and I had to gate the German Pinschers out of the kitchen, because they were being especially monsterly by putting their noses in the grocery sacks. When we were almost done putting things away, I told Richard “You can let Dingbat and Banjo out of there.” Richard began laughing and asked “Dingbat and Banjo. Ok, but which is Dingbat and which is Banjo?” And then simultaneously I said “I don’t care.” as Richard said “Wait, I get it.” And simultaneously again I said “No, Ly has to be Dingbat.” as Richard also said “Ly has to be Dingbat.” Richard was laughing so hard, I was able to get my camera and snap this photo of him leaning against the kitchen sink while holding a case of toilet paper over his shoulder and laughing his arse off. I even had time to zoom and frame the photo to cut out the toilet paper, but in retrospect the photo might have been better with the toilet paper. We love our Ly, but she’s not the sharpest crayon in the box. But as Richard wisely pointed out “We probably couldn’t handle two GPs as smart as Blue.”
The second layout was originally made to satisfy my obsession with 2-page layouts. (I'll dedicate a post to that subject someday.) It also documents some mundane details about the dishsoap we had been using and refers to the same shopping trip as the first layout.
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Just Another Saturday. Credits: Frames: Shabby Princess, Havest Spice Fonts: CK Academia and American Typewriter |
The journaling reads:
The dishsoap we'd been buying at Sam's club smells bad. I think it smells like marijuana. Richard says I'm crazy, but I think I know more about what pot smells like then he does. At any rate, I hate the smell of our dishsoap. It makes the otherwise horrible chore of washing dishes even more horrrible.
We forgot to get dishsoap at Sam's two weeks ago and had to pick up a bottle at the grocery store. Richard pointed to this blue bottle on the shelf and said "That's the kind we got last time." By "last time", I thought he meant the last time we had to buy dishsoap at the grocery store. Imagine my horror when I got home and discovered it was the same pot-smelling dishsoap we buy at Sam's club. I hate that dishsoap and was looking forward to a break.
Today we ran errands in Santa Fe. Dishsoap was now on our list. I was thrilled when we went to Sam's today and found that they are carrying a new flavor of dishsoap. Yay, no more pot-smelling dishsoap. I am very happy now.
The title I chose to give these layouts (not the title on the page) says it all "Just Another Saturday". But it is just another Saturday at this point in our lives. Someday, perhaps, our lives will be totally different. Who knows what a routine Saturday will be like in 10 or 15 years?
If I could give three pieces of advice to help you document the everyday details of your life it would be:
1. Take notes in your journal or calendar. Jot down your thoughts, snippets of conversations, etc. Note when you've gone out to dinner or a movie. I like to use my calendar, then all my appointments, trips, etc. are already in there. Then use these notes to journal on your layouts. Scrapbooking without journaling is just a fancy photo album, I always say.
2. Take lots of pictures. Try P365. I think everyone knows that P365 is a project in which you take a photo a day. Try it. I started it last year and even though I floundered and eventually stopped it really helped me get into the habit of carrying a camera (I keep a small digital in my purse at all times), using my camera-cell phone more often and taking photos of the everyday details. Even though I am no longer doing P365, I still take more photos than I did pre-2010.
3. Be willing to use imperfect photos on your layouts. Sometimes a blurry, or otherwise less than perfect photo, is all you have to document a memory. Isn't the memory worth remembering, anyway?
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