Day #25 of 30 Days to a Simpler Life --- Enjoy Your Photos and Mementos

Today, round up all of your photos and put them in one place.  That's all you have to do.  Make a commitment to buy some photo boxes in the near future.  With these boxes, you will be able to sort your photos.  Read on for details. (30 Days to a Simpler Life, p. 156)

OR for serious simplifiers only...

Create one fabulous photo album from your most prized photos of the past.  You might choose great snapshots from several big events --- vacations, birthdays, weddings, christenings.  Forget the detailed system we described above.  Don't do anything that takes more than a couple of hours.  Store the best of the rest of your photos in a banker's box and give some to family members.  Do this project, put it aside, and get back to the joy of living in the present. (30 Days to a Simpler Life, p. 163)

This chapter has a lot of helpful hints that are too numerous for me to write here, like some great ideas of what to do with color copies (e.g. greeting cards, placemats, collages, etc.).  I also liked their idea of having "An Old Lady Box."  The Old Lady Box is supposed to be a small box with mementos from the year that you put in storage to enjoy when you're an old lady.  :-)  Back to business...

In short, here's what you're supposed to do with the task above.  Once you have all the photos in one place, you are supposed to sort them into the boxes chronologically or by event or in some other fashion that makes sense to you.  Then, they advise you to buy a bunch of cheap photo albums so you can put them all in without agonizing over which photos to keep.  For all you avoiders, there is no mention of scrapbooking here!  

The one reason I think I keep not doing any photo projects is that I don't feel like scrapbooking them.  The biggest thorn in my side in this arena is our 2004 Italy trip photos.  I started a fabulous scrapbook when we got home from the trip.  I used matting and stickers and die cuts and stamping.  I got the first four days of the trip done (it was a 2 week tour) and it looks fabulous, but I just don't want to put out that much effort to finish it.  I keep beating myself up and thinking if I don't do the rest of the book just as nice as the first 4 days worth it's going to look weird.  Instead, I need to tell myself doesn't it look weirder that there's only 4 days of a 14 day trip in the scrapbook?  

On a good note, with the exception of the Italy trip, all of our photos prior to 2008 are in scrapbooks or photo albums.  The Cobbler always kept his childhood photos just shoved in a shoe box.  A couple of years ago I made him help me put them in chronological order and label them, and I put them all in photo albums.  Since Tom Thumb was born in 2007, I've pretty much done nothing other than take pictures and upload them onto the computer.  At Christmas every year, I print our top 24 greatest hits of the year for all the grandparents and aunt and uncles and put them in mini albums.  That's been about the extent of it.

So I'm setting a new goal today --- by the end of 2011, all my photos to date will be in albums or scrapbooks.  There...I said it.  Now what am I going to do with that Italy album?