Hey, When Your Husband Says You Need to Scrapbook...

I started scrapbooking right after college. My first albums are now declared pathetic pages slathered with rubber cement {GASP}, hodge-podge applications of mismatched stickers, and pictures of all sizes randomly distributed over whatever background paper I happened to have on hand.

It's embarrassing, really. So much so that I don't even really want to talk about it.

But over the years, I poured myself into scrapbooking. I found my style...my groove in the thing. I found friends who had as deep a love for the craft as I did, and we'd get together on weekends, hunched over my rickety dining room table, gulping Polar Pops and licking brownie crumbs off our fingers. We'd rotate movies in the other room but the understood scrapbooking silence hung in the room. We could be together but in our own worlds...reliving memories.

My friends got married...started having babies...and scrapbook days were harder to come by. They either had to bring the kids along {which drastically reduces productivity} or hire a sitter {which drastically reduces supply funds}, so more and more, I found myself scrapbooking alone.

By that time, I lived alone, so it worked out. I could haul out all the supplies and if they stayed out a few days, no one cared. I could scrapbook in the evenings after work or all weekend if I had no plans.

And then I discovered digital scrapping, which allowed me to do twice the work in half the time, and I LOVED it. Another reason I loved digital scrapping...the chance to really write.

I could sit there and type out a whole story about an event - and it was done faster than I could have handwritten a little journaling box in the traditional scrapbook.

My scrapbooks became my books. My stories. My autobiography. The chronicles of vacations, weekenders, the year at large, milestones, and more.

And then I got married.

Suddenly, life became much busier. In a beautiful, welcomed way. I had real dinners to plan and prepare. While the addition of a husband meant the addition of help around the house and consequently less work for me in some ways, it also meant being more diligent about work.

I admit, I felt rather guilty about scrapbooking. Ryan would be hurrying around outside, trying to squeeze in yard work before dark, or dragging out the tool box to repair yet another thing that wasn't working quite right in the house, and I would be kicked back on the couch, sipping coffee and cropping pictures.

So I made rules. I would only scrapbook if it was a weekend when Ryan worked and I was home alone. Or during football games when he was busy watching and I was content to multi-task.

But here's the beautiful thing. One day when I apologized for scrapbooking {again} when I knew there were other, more pressing things to do, Ryan scooped me up in a hug, kissed my nose and told me he WANTS me to scrapbook because in doing that, I'm preserving our story. I'm keeping track of our life and we'll always have it to look at. "So, no guilt," he said. "Enjoy it."

After I was resuscitated...I smiled and said, "Well if you say I NEED to do it...who am I to argue??"