In Bloom Doula Services

When I was 10 years old I got a scrapbooking kit as a gift for Christmas. My mom gave me duplicates of family photos we had and I began making a scrapbook of my life. I made a page for our Disney trip, playing violin and being on swim team, a page for my pets, a page with my cousins. I did it all on my own and ever since then I have been hooked. I joined the scrapbooking club in junior high (I was obviously super cool) and was the Historian for my school Orchestra.

I have been a compulsive documenter of my life since then: journaling, taking photos, making scrapbooks, and memory boxes. I’d make a scrapbook for every year of my life and it became my hobby, what I did for fun, and became a mental way for me to add closure to different seasons of my life. As if I could organize and tuck memories away into files and open them up as needed.

I’ve carried this into my adult life and once I started using an iPhone the amount of picture taking kind of exploded into the thousands per year and became overwhelming. Additionally the costs of printing those photos, and buying scrapbook materials just became too expensive. I also didn’t have space for the amount of scrapbooks those photos would have needed, or the time to continue scrapbooking the way I did before life got really busy in college, and then when I began to work full time, and as I became a mom. It would be almost impossible to spread out all my materials on the floor and spend hours cutting, and gluing and arranging photos with a handsy baby grabbing or crawling over my stuff and interrupting. So my scrapbooking hobby was put on hold for many years, but my documenting never slowed down.

It started to stress me out having thousands of photos stored on my phone or laptop, but not ever doing anything with them, and I felt like I couldn’t let a moment go without photographing it, so the back log of pictures just grew and grew. Every month or so I’d upload all my new photos to my laptop, and back them up on flash drives. I knew I’d never be able to scrapbook all of this and it suddenly felt like a chore, another task I needed to keep up with to preserve all the memories for my family. Because photos are kind of a central thing for families, and it’s a chore that mothers generally take responsibility of.

My mom was the memory keeper for our family, filming home videos, arranging pictures in albums, making baby books for my brother and I, and saving all of our school work, art projects, and Honor Roll certificates, and birthday cards to make us scrapbooks and memory boxes. My dad wouldn’t be able to tell you where any of those things were, and never remembered to bring a camera anywhere. It is kind of expected by people like my dad that someone else will take care of it, because that is a “mom’s job.” My mom’s dad was the opposite though. He was a photographer for fun, and so many of my family memories of him involve going though slides of pictures he took. I loved the sound of the slide machine buzzing, the click of moving to the next one, the smell of the heat of it running. I loved the nostalgia of it, and it made me appreciate the importance of the role of the memory keeper. It was a bonding experience for our family and it never got old to me.

This was reinforced to me as I started dating Nathan. It was a way to connect to his family, and bond with his grandma, and get to know his mom who had passed away. Going through scrapbooks they had made Nathan and seeing his baby photos, and pictures of him growing up. We watched 8mm film home videos of his mom growing up one Christmas, and I know that I want to have those same experiences with my boys as they grow up, and when they bring home girlfriends who will become their wives. It is something I value, but I am the only one who will do it.

I realized I needed an alternative to scrapbooking, but would still be a way I could have tangible photos laid out in chronological order to preserve our family memories. So a few years ago I started making Shutterfly albums, which in my opinion is the best album making website. I have tried a few other websites, but they don’t compare. They are either more expensive, not as user friendly, don’t have as many options, and more importantly won’t let me upload as many photos per album.

Shutterfly allows you to upload 1,000 photos per album, provides endless online storage for photos if you want to back them up in an additional place, and they offer so many promo codes and sales that you can save literally a hundred dollars per project. (This is not sponsored or anything. I just wanted to share this.)

When I decided to start making albums as oppossed to scrapbooks I was about 4 years behind, and just started making albums for events or chunks of life to catch up: an album for our honeymoon, an album for my senior year of college, an album for different trips I’d gone on, etc. This is still pretty time consuming, but much less work, but it is still work. And the more I did this, and the more hours I plugged away uploading photos, backing them up, arranging them like puzzle pieces to fit the best way, and add captions and details to the pages, I realized how under appreciated this work is.

People often make joke comments like “oh, Alexa needs a picture…” and I get reluctant participation and smiles, but I would put money down that in 10, 15, 20 years from now people will really enjoy looking through albums and I know my family will appreciate being able to look back on them. If my family ends up being at all like all the families I know looking through them together and laughing at different pictures, and making fun of our glasses or haircuts of whatever will be really cherished moments together. It has just become so glaringly obvious how it isn’t viewed as work for the family, it still seems to be written off as my hobby or fun, when it really does mean taking on another thing to keep up with, organize, and dedicate hours to, even though I do enjoy it. I just want it to be appreciated.

I take all the pictures, and write in the journals and baby books, and fill up baby boxes with things like hair from first hair cuts and hospital bracelets, and write the boys birthday letters and holiday cards not just so we can hold on to these memories, but so they could have a piece of who I am that won’t go away. My husband lost his mom at 19, so he has memories of her, but one of my greatest fears is something happening to me, and my boys being so young that they won’t remember me, or that I will lose my memory and need all of these things to remind me of the life I have lived.

Finally, after years of making albums for hours and budgeting when I could afford to buy them, I am finally all caught up with my albums. It is one thing I have accomplished during our isolation living. It feels like a big weight is lifted now that I am done with this seemingly never ending project. Technically it isn’t over because I will keep taking pictures of everything my family does and making albums of each year, but it doesn’t feel as daunting when I am up to date. It has been satisfying to see all of scrapbooks and albums complete and complied together kind of documenting my entire life.

I know this blog is kind of a departure from my other blogs, but I just really wanted to take a moment to really address this work that goes unappreciated and overlooked, but is actually really valued by the people we love, and often times falls on the shoulders of mothers. So remember to thank your memory keepers who take on the job of documenting the lives of loves ones. It is such an act of love because unlike cooking, cleaning, laundry and all the other tasks mothers take care of, the show will go on without it.

I felt like something I have been working on for so long needed a tribute of some sort, and I know I am not the only mom out there taking care of this job, in addition to many overlooked and undervalued jobs everyday. Although we would really appreciate a “thank you” for all we do, the work we do that goes unacknowledged is not in vain. Pouring out love of any kind into our families will have eternal impacts in the hearts we raising.