Creative Memories

Creativity pours out of my soul every single day. Always making something, creating items from nothing is how my well is filled. A day without creating is a wasted day in my opinion. Creating my crafts is what fulfills me and fills my days with beauty.

As a young child, my parents recognized my ability to be creative, purchasing endless supplies of glue, scissors, paper, pencils, and markers. I would spend hours snipping away at paper to create elaborate projects to fill the fridge door up.

As I grew, my love of paper crafts grew. Everything had to be scrapbooked with such delicacy to tell a story of me. As I grew and expanded, so did my projects. Leading up to holidays and birthdays would be spent finding the right papers, stickers and elements to create a one of a kind project for a beloved family member.

After my father had two open heart surgeries at 44, he struggled to remember many things from years past. I poured over countless photos to put together and boom of memories from all of us as we grew up. Trips to Northern Wisconsin, watching hot air balloons sore through the sky, to simple reminders of our favorite summer treats. As I watched my father flip through the pages, the memories trickled back in. We would laugh about the time my little brother rolled down the hill or getting me to try to water ski (spoiler I still can’t).

That was the moment I knew how important it was to document our lives in a colorful way. Scrapbook became second nature to me. As my new husband and I moved across the country, we were unpacking and found all of his photos and moments from his Navy days. He had a story for every picture or item he pulled out.

At that moment I knew that his history needed to be documented right so I set forth to organize and properly document his time in the Navy. I asked questions about the pictures and items. Everything brought a smile to his face and joy at remembering a time so different from his present. He would joke about how this story or that story isn’t one he’s telling our kids. The book grew and grew until I finally set down a brimming scrapbook of his time. To this day nearly 20 years later, he still pulls it out to remember those days.

Our first child was born after we struggled with back to back miscarriages. This tiny brown haired, blue eyed girl was ours and I started documenting everything. Filling up book after book of pictures and mementos of her new life. Creation of scrapbooks for grandparents were created. Her albums grew and grew to a point that I wasn’t sure where I would stick them but I knew one day she would look back and know the love that created them.

As our second child arrived, it was much harder to keep up with constant documentation of both kids. His albums aren’t nearly as vast. I also was struggling as a person, dealing with a heavy anxiety from a job that had consumed me, leaving me a shell of who I once was. As a family we decided that I would leave the job and I started to crawl out of that dark place and began once again documenting the life we live.

Now our kids are older and we are married nearly 20 years. My bookshelves and pretty much any nook or cranny is filled with various scrapbooks, travelers notebooks, and journals of our life. Our walks are lined with pictures of our adventures in life. Some grand and some not so grand.

As the pandemic and quarantine expanded, I decided that this was an important time to document. Even though we were virtually doing everything, I would sit nearly every day and jot a few words down in a journal. Adding pictures of great moments as well as not so great moments. Using my vast pens, markers, scissors, and paper as I did as a small child, I went about documenting our life like wonderful meals, conversations we had, and even fights.

It was a time of so many emotions that it was vital to document it. Now it five, ten or fifty years after I am long gone, my children can pull these moments out to share with their children. They can see what our lives were like with funny pictures and stickers to showcase the time we spent.

My passion is still there to document our lives but it has evolved a great deal. No longer large scrapbook spreads where now replaced with a simple leather bound travelers notebook that I write notes, and paste pictures in. It’s important to document the feelings of that first at bat in your high school softball game or wearing your favorite mask to school.

This is a small everyday thing that helps with my creativity. It will continue to evolve as I get older but I will work hard to continue documenting all the things that are in our lives.