I’m not a scrapbooker. I won’t sit down with scalloped scissors, expensive paper and glue to make each page it’s own beautiful individual snowflake of a page. I admire the work of others, but I just can’t bring myself to participate in the trend.

I will, however, shove photos from others, ticket stubs, birthday cards, postcards, and just a few choice prints of my own that I’ve ordered into an envelope as the months go along. Then, one Saturday morning, after the dog and cats have been fed and before my NGHubby awakes, I’ll sit down with a a cup of coffee (shade grown, of course!) and my standard plastic pocket photo album. Everything fits nicely in there, perhaps with a little photo pocket manipulation and some scotch tape, but in general, it’s the easiest scrapbooking ever.

The idea came from the photo album Mom gave us when we got engaged. I kept that up for the whole engagement.

I let the faux-scrapbooking go for a while, but I’ve been saving things again in that manila envelope to commemorate pregnancy and give baby-to-be a little peek into life before she’s born.

P.S. I also like the shoebox approach. There’s something about handling the photos themselves that’s satisfying.

Is this at all relevant to your discussion? I think it is in this respect: l “lose” any pictures that remain in digital form. I look at them once and think, oh, yes, very nice. I never look at them again. I certainly won’t look for them 10 years from now. They will either have to be in an album (that someone else has taken the time to put together because I won’t), or they will have to show up in one of my randomly dis-arranged shoe boxes. Either way, they will probably be far more readily accessible to me, and therefore more frequently accessed, than had they remained in digitized form only.