My sweet wife has an addiction to rubber stamps, paper cutouts, brads, hole punches, picture layouts, colored paper, ink, toner, ribbons, scissors and tape. All signs indicate that she has contracted that life-altering infection commonly known as “Scrapbookus Giganticus Obsessium” or “Recordum Lifeus Largo” Some of the more obvious signs of this addiction include a dizzying array of colored ink pads, enough paper to make the environuts go postal, and photographs scattered from heck to breakfast throughout the house. An ever increasing number of scrapbooks seem to absorb an ever diminishing supply of bookshelf real estate, and the one thing in the house my wife can always find is her camera.
My wife’s “affliction” has ratcheted up her creativity (already impressive) to heights never explored before. She has become much more tech savvy with her digital camera and the computer that organizes a plethora of pictures each week. She can turn ordinary events into a celebration of family life, and records them in a way that drive us back to the books time and again to relive fun times and remember those moments which help shape our family’s character.
In the not so distant past, my wife took her scrapbooking out to the blogosphere where she has not only recorded images of our life, but written her own thoughts about the images shown there and how they have affected her. I look at her blog regularly to get her wonderful perspective on life and parenting, and I thoroughly enjoy the way that my wife is recording our family history. I am confident that future generations of my family will also be blessed by the things that she has recorded about us, just like we are blessed by the journals and photographs of our ancestors.
I am grateful for my wife and her attention to the details that make up our experiences here. I thoroughly enjoy her hobby and am glad that she has found something fun for her to work on during the few quiet hours she gets at home.
Paul, my wife also does some scrapbooking and has her own blog, which she uses to post pictures of the family and update all our distant relatives and friends. Pretty cool.
My wife also suffers from this same affliction, although she is not an active blogger. We have multiple cabinets dedicated to her scrapbook supplies and I am relegated to one lonely cabinet in the garage with which to store my few possessions. 😉
Congratulations on having such talented wives, I am envious. Whenever they have an enrichment craft night, I come home, in frustration throw away whatever it is we made. Let me put it this way, I help my kids with their school projects and have no worries the teacher will think an adult did any part of it.
Basically I am art/scrapbook challenged. About 10-12 years ago, my friends, who are scrapbookers, convinced me I could learn how to scrapbook. I went to a few parties and tried my hand at some easy stuff. Gaining some confidence, I bought a few tools and supplies. I decided to make our Christmas cards that particular year. I chose what I believed to be an easy card and I began my task with much enthusiasm. I made mistakes from day one, bought more supplies and kept plugging along. The task took several weeks, and many times I broke down in frustration. DH Mike just kept saying, “Why are you torturing yourself like this?”
Me: ” Scrapbooking is relaxing and fun”
Mike: “It doesn’t look like you are having fun”.
I got my CHristmas cards out that year, saved a couple to remember what could have been, if I was not artistically challenged, and have never looked back. I still am in awe of people with this particular skill. Jie Jie, my oldest daughter who is artistic, will be a scrapbooker. I see the joy when she spends a day with a friend who has a scrapbooking mom. So I am saving my barely used supplies to bequeath to her when she is older.
My wife skipped past the corporeal scrap books and went straight to digital. She keeps a blog which has pictures, movies, and commentary on all kids of events in our family life. I go there when work is bad, it reminds me why I’m slaving away. Like your wife, she can always find her digital camera and really loves her copy of Photoshop Elements and the online class she took in how to use it.
She prints copies of some of the pictures, and my office and our house are decorated with some of these fond memories. I admire the creative women (and men) who are able to do this. I’m an analytic guy and my creativity starts and stops with furniture.
Hey Paul, where is the confession? I kept waiting for something really juicy!