Otherwise known as how
"A Serious Case of Scrapper's Guilt" led to the discovery of my precious.
So I told you
here about how I had spent much of the month of April sorting and purging in my Studio, and more specifically trying to corral and organize a lot of memorabilia. You were all suitably impressed with the progress I had made in pulling together piles, boxes, bags, and envelopes of "stuff" to come up with a single organized file box of photos, memorabilia, and art work from the first five years of life for each of my daughters. And I certainly appreciated the pat on the back, needed it in fact, because...
This is a photo of my memorabilia organization system (excluding the bit I just created as described above):
The box holds 12x12 hanging file folders and is eleven inches deep. Believe me when I tell you that is room for a LOT of memorabilia!
At one time I had three of these boxes FULL. One and a half of the boxes contained a folder each for grades K through 12 times three girls - yes, 39 folders of school photos and memorabilia. The rest were vacations and miscellaneous topics (weddings, newspaper clippings, scrapbooking events, etc.). And I was very proud of the fact that I not only diligently collected and appropriately stored all this STUFF, but that I actually used it in my scrapbooking! In fact, two full boxes worth have been moved into albums. Now admittedly, not all of the girls' school stuff has actually been scrapped, but it is in the albums ready to go when I have time to assemble pages.
So, as I was saying, I was busy cleaning and purging in my studio when I found a shopping bag FULL TO THE BRIM with memorabilia. It included Rachel and Becca's third grade school photos (which I had thought perhaps we didn't purchase when I couldn't find them in their school folders). It included a handful of miscellaneous stuff. But most of all, it included all of the brochures, ticket stubs, and stuff from our 2002 trip to Orlando when we visited Discovery Cove, Sea World, Universal Studios, and Kennedy Space Center. Do you see how thick that Orlando folder is now? (Rivaled only by Hawaii which I've avoided scrapping because I'm stuck in perfection mode where that one is concerned). And I was overcome with Scrapper's Guilt. Guilt that I hadn't ever properly filed these items. Guilt that since it wasn't properly filed, it obviously wasn't scrapped either! Ten years later and apparently that trip was never properly documented. Guilt that my girls' third grade photos almost never made it into their school albums! And now I'm wondering what else I might have tucked away somewhere that I've completely forgotten about...
Among the stuff crammed into that bag was this:
A pin from our 2003 Cruise to Nassau, The Bahamas aboard Carnival's cruise ship "The Fascination" which I had earned for our family while I was a consultant for the now-defunct scrapbooking company "Scrap in a Snap". And that pin brought me to...
My pin vest:
A now mostly forgotten treasure that lives in the far back of my closet.
I started collecting pins in the late 90's I think. I have the same vest (in child size) for each of my girls. The pins represent places we've been, things we've done, organizations to which we've belonged. Accordingly, no two vests have all the same pins. And much like
Sian's scouting badges each and every pin on this vest has a story behind it. Pin collecting went out of vogue for our family when the girls hit their teens. We don't have pins for our trip to Hawaii (shame on me). I'm hoping years from now my girls will pull those vests out of their respective closets and be glad that they have a record (besides the scrapbooks) of so many memories from their young lives. As for me, now that I've rediscovered this treasure, I think I need to start collecting pins again!
For more Precious Stories visit Sian's Story Telling Sunday.
