It's Finished!

After ten years of marriage, our wedding album is done!

Wow, you say, is that REALLY behind or what? Well, sort of. I started in 2007, so I'm slow, but not ten years slow. At that time, our wedding pictures were in a nice wooden box-style album. It has a picture frame top and opens to several small hanging albums with wooden spines and slots for pictures. I'm not saying this is optimal, I'm just emphasizing that it was a real place to put pictures, not just a shoebox, because it was at that point that my husband started saying "You are making these great albums, but it so sad that our wedding pictures are just in a box!".

After I finished spluttering that they weren't just in a box, I realized that he would like them to be scrapbooked and I would love to scrapbook them, so I better get started! Since I was pregnant with Sammy, I reasoned that before his birth would be the perfect time to do it. I worked on it only at the "scrap nights" we used to have with a fun little group of girls, led by Jennifer. I attended a scrapbooking retreat at Jennifer's invitation in January of 2008, making some progress. But then I was all out of scrapbooking-specific occasions, so I set up a serious workstation at home and spent all my late-night time that I couldn't sleep because of heartburn, contractions, heartburn, the baby head-butting me repeatedly, heartburn, and general discomfort (and heartburn) working on the album.

I finished the sections for the preparation and the wedding in February the night before Sammy was born! I was scheduled to be induced on a Monday morning and my mom was flying in on Sunday evening. Her flight was delayed, and then delayed some more until it was 2:00am by the time James arrived back from fetching her at the airport. By the time she arrived, voila! It was done.

As lovely as that was, I really wanted the honeymoon in the same album. We went to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada with our little film camera. Most of the pictures had only one of them in it, and there were so few compared to our digital snap-happy style of taking pictures. Some of the scenes were lovely and I hated to let myself think "I'll do that someday", and never get back to it. So I went back to work on it.

Inspired by my sister's completion of her son's album, I took it with me on this past holiday trip with the faint hope of making some progress. Finally, just before the stroke of midnight on the last day of the year, watching the Times Square party from my Granny's house in Alamagordo, New Mexico, I finished the last page. Being the statistics- and symmetry-loving girl that I am, I was particularly pleased to have it done during this calendar year.

It was so funny to see us as we were then ("What in the world am I doing wearing pink jeans!?"). But it was sobering to realize how much I had forgotten. I couldn't place many of the pictures: "James, do you know what day this is?", "James, where was this?", "James, what were we doing here?" Good thing hubby dear has a good memory. He finally wrote down a schedule of what we had done each day, what kind of place we had eaten, and some of his favorite memories. I sometimes hear people talk about scrapbooking for other audiences - our friends, our family, our kids... but as much as that's true, I'm treasuring in my own heart the memories of our first days of marriage!