Good times remembered

I love scrapbooks, but I am the world's worst scrapbooker. The top shelf in my office closet is filled with boxes of pictures and negatives. I thought I was doing good when I bought a camera that stamped the date on the photo, no more trying to remember when the photo was taken.

When my kids were younger, I would make double prints of the photos and send the extra to my mom, who lives 1000 (more or less) miles away from me. One year, my entire family of origin and their families were gathered at my brother's house for Thanksgiving. My sister, Sharon, handed me a Christmas present and wanted me to open it then. Oh wow, I was given the best present-in-the-world that day. She had taken most of the extra prints I had sent my mom and organized them into two of the most wonderful scrapbooks!

Then two years ago I bought a digital camera. Now, instead of boxes of photos and negatives, I have folders in my computer and disks in my desk drawer.

For Christmas this year, I was given a digital photo frame. I took most of the photos of my kids and copied them to the frame. When turned on, it runs a constant slide show of the photos. Or I can stop it at just one of them, or load a video or MP3 and add music to the slides show. It is amazing. Brandi was looking at the photos with me and one of us at Imperial Beach in San Diego this past Sept came up. She looked at me sighed and said, "That was a fun day, wasn't it Mom?"

So I am thinking that I am going to make more of an effort to get those photos out of their boxes and folders and onto real paper and into scrapbooks so that we can remember the good times a bit more often.