Big families need people like you who appreciate us. Ha. We’re a unique breed at times! Good luck with having two soon!

I used to give my mom a hard time about some of these things… I was baby #9. Now I understand.

Don’t do it if it’s going to be a burden! It’s too easy to put more and more burdens on ourselves, all the “shoulds” that don’t happen, and just make us feel like failures. Your children will survive just fine without scrapbooks or baby albums. You are a great mother!

One year for Christmas my mother made all of us a scrapbook with pictures and memories from our childhood. I was in my 20s at the time. I love it. But you know, growing up, we just had the odd photos in those sticky-back albums. Half the time we’d go on family vacations and leave the camera behind (film was so expensive back then!!!) If you want to scrapbook but just don’t have the time now, don’t sweat it – there are plenty of years ahead of you where your life doesn’t revolve around nappies and noses. Or, if it’s just not your thing at all, that’s fine too. But, if it’s something that you enjoy doing, that will add to your life and give you a creative outlet, by all means carve the time to do it. Just don’t let it become something else to burden yourself with. Life is a beautiful, joyful, wonderful thing. Your children are miracles, and you are enough for them, just the way you are.

Ha. I’m cheap too. Thanks for the ideas! Now to find the motivation to actually do it. Wrote in my personal journal this past Sunday after church, first time since March of this year. I really want to be better about all of this. I used to write in my journal everyday. And take more pictures too.

There are plenty of products you do have to pay for; but I use free scrapbooking software from scrapbookflair.com and then I use a mix of their products and other free digi scrapbooking products. If you do a Google search you’ll come up with more free stuff than you’ll ever use.. I just do regular letter size because it’s easier to print out and you can use any old 3 ring binder. I use page protectors for mine; so the only costs are the 3-ring binders (mine are all pretty old, I rescued them from the rubbish bin at work, so replacing those is on my eventually-to-do-list), the sheet protectors, and printing (which my husband does at work for cost, for about 10 cents a page.) It’s much cheaper than old-fashioned scrapbooking and it’s also much quicker; on Sunday I managed to do 30 pages in between doing other stuff. (I usually don’t have that much to do; but I hadn’t scrapped our trip to Japan. We fit a lot into that trip; so there were a lot of pages to scrap.)

You can also do photo books instead (artscow has great prices for those, I can usually get a 20 page hard-cover stitched-not-glued 6×6 album for around $5) but I like the digital stuff because then I have digital copies of everything too. I do make a lot of photo books (for instance I have a Christmas tradition now where I give the kids a photo book about one of my grandparents) but I prefer doing my own pages and sticking them in albums, because it’s cheaper and I’m not limited to 20 pages. (With artscow albums you can pay more for more than 20 pages, but as I think I’ve already established, I’m cheap.)

Ha. We are totally perfect, better parents before we have kids. Ha ha ha.

And I have seen some awesome apps too for journaling for kids and stuff that I really need to look into more. I haven’t scrapbooked (it was a physical one) since high school. Ha. Do you have to pay for it?

I am ridiculously up to date with my kids’ albums (it’s easy for me, there are only two of them and they’re in school!) and if it’s something you’re interested in, I have a great tip. If it’s not something you’re interested in don’t sweat it, your kids will be perfectly fine!! But for me, digi-scrapbooking is so quick and easy. I can do it all on the computer, and for the most part I can get away with doing one page and printing it out twice. (This doesn’t work if it’s stuff that only involves the one kid, like a birthday.) I usually wait until I have a few months’ worth to do and then sit down and do 10 or 20 pages at a time. The added bonus is that I have a digital copy of all of their pages. We live in a bushfire-prone area, so once a year I save all of the pages I’ve done for that year on the cloud, and on an external hard drive, which lives in our grab-and-go bag, and on a couple of USB sticks which live in the cars, and then I know that even if we lose the home and the physical albums, we’ll still have the photos.