Well. That took a minute. I had not intended to disappear for two months, but that seems to be what happened. The news has all been good, friends. Surgery removed all of the cancer, and it had not spread to my lymph nodes. I do not need chemotherapy or radiation, and post-surgery treatment is an endocrine therapy pill I’ll take once a day for 5-10 years to help prevent the cancer from coming back. I have one more surgery in August, and once I’ve healed from that, I’ll put this recent unpleasantness behind me and get on with having a fabulous time. Thank you for your prayers and support. They got me through a truly rough time.
I had a post almost ready to go way back in early May but didn’t finish it before my surgery. I naively thought I’d finish it up once I got back home and hit the publish button a day or two later. Turns out I had underestimated how much time I would spend staring at the wall in a drug-induced haze. In the spirit of Better Late Than Never, here is that post.
Let it be known far and wide throughout the land that I have finished Daniel’s baby book! I finished a month early in fact, so big time congratulations are in order.
By the time the second baby came around, I was well into my “embrace mediocrity” stage of motherhood and housekeeping, a stage that lasted until—well, it’s still going on. But I made a baby book for the first kid, so to be fair, I needed to make a baby book for the second kid.
The problem is I really hate scrapbooking. Like, it even annoys me that “scrapbook” is used anywhere as a verb. Paper stresses me out. (That made the preschool years when so. much. paper. came home from school tons of fun.) Add stickers and an expectation to create something artistic, and I freeze. Plus a baby and a preschooler were not conducive to having time to do much of anything productive.
But I was determined to finish, and I made the embracing mediocrity goal of finishing the book by the time Daniel finished high school. I was secretly hoping some enterprising girlfriend who wanted to get in good with Mama would finish it for me, but alas, she has not yet materialized.
I have many talented friends who have made beautiful, magazine-worthy scrapbooks for their families. Every page has borders and stickers and cleverly cropped photos that look amazing. Every milestone is documented, and every vacation memory preserved in artfully organized books. I love to look at other people’s scrapbooks, but I find myself unable to work up the energy to make them myself. For those of you who love scrapbooking, God bless you! I’m super glad you have a creative outlet you love.
My friends and I used to go on “scrapbooking weekends” when our kids were small. (Is that still a thing?) We would go to someone’s mountain cabin or lake house—we might have gone to the beach once—and everyone would bring their latest scrapbook project and all the tools and supplies they had. Friends would share stickers and cutting tools and whatnot, and we would spend an entire weekend eating comfort food, watching movies, and working on scrapbooks, blissfully far away from our children whom we were lovingly immortalizing on Creative Memories pages.
At least my friends would work on scrapbooks. Every trip, I would bring my specially designed scrapbook roller bag filled with markers, background papers, stickers, photographs, and the scrapbook that refused to make itself. Every trip, I would take out the scrapbook and supplies and look at them, hoping for inspiration. Some trips, I would get part of a page completed, but most times I’d look at everything for about 15 minutes, lose interest, pack it all back up, and get out my knitting. The whole time I’m thinking:
I made a hard push toward finishing it when Daniel started kindergarten and again when he started middle school, but mostly everything sat in a closet mocking me with its unfinishedness.
Thankfully, there’s nothing like a self-imposed deadline to get one in the Git-R-Done spirit, and with graduation looming, I pulled everything out on a Saturday in late April. I was only four pages from finished, but it took me all. dang. day. It’s weird how one can find lots of things that “need” to be done other than the thing one doesn’t want to do. Especially when that “one” is me, and the thing to be done is finish a scrapbook.
The good news is: the scrapbook is finished! And I finished it an entire month before Daniel graduated, so Yay Me! The scrapbook is…fine. It will not win any design awards, but if he ever wonders how old he was when his first tooth came in or what he thought about his first taste of reconstituted baby cereal, he has somewhere to find that information.
As much as I struggle with the process of creating scrapbooks, I do enjoy them once they are finished. It’s nice to hold actual printed photographs in your hands, and the photo technology switch from film to digital has made us all less likely to print out our photos and put them where they can be easily enjoyed forever. Digital photos are so much less permanent, as we discovered when the external hard drive containing all of our photos from the past 20 years died suddenly. All the pictures of the kids growing up—gone. (Yes, I know. We should have backed up the back up.)
Thankfully, a data recovery service was able to recover all of our photos, but it was expensive to have them do it, and we were heartbroken when we thought they were lost. One of my projects for the fall will be to get the digital photos organized and the bests ones printed. I will not be making scrapbooks with them, but I’ll give online photobooks a try and see if that is a more palatable way to accomplish the same thing. At the end of it, it will be nice to have a book of memories without having had to cut out anything or artfully sticker a page.
Hopefully this project won’t take quite so long. We will see.
My plan is to try to get back to some sort of regular schedule with Sweet Tea. We will see how that goes as well. Writing is a muscle, and my writing muscle is fat and flabby from disuse right now. The plan is to shake the rust off and get back in the game. (How’s that for mixing a bunch of metaphors?) Regardless, it’s great to be back and focusing on fun things.
Until next time,
Karla
Congratulations on finishing Daniel's scrapbook, did you save any room for college memories?