The burden of documenting our lives

Am I the only one who feels like I can NEVER catch up with photo albums? I mean, everyone takes hundreds of pictures, so its not the actual digital photos themselves that are the burden. Its compiling them from the iPhone, iPad, digital camera, etc into one place, then sorting, dating, uploading, printing THEN archiving those rascals.

Confession: I have not updated any hard photos albums since December 2010. Yes, that is 2 years ago. Yet I have thousands of digital images on my various devices that are just sitting there, eating up precious memory space and waiting to be used in some way, shape or form.

But then the burden snowballs...okay, I've got the digital pics in one place, sorted by month & year, weeded out the bad ones and ready to upload, but what next? Do I upload to shutterfly and do a photobook? This will be a small fortune considering it would be upwards of 100 pages long for each year, not to mention time consuming. Or do I upload my pics to Costco and get them printed as 4x6 prints and just mount them in photobooks myself? More labor intensive but probably less expensive and I can do it in stages at my own pace. And I don't do anything fancy...just double-stick tape & a sharpie.

After debating back & forth for several weeks, I decided to dive in with the latter and just work on it a little bit every evening. My goal is to catch up to date by the time Baby Brother is born in May. So far, I've successfully printed 2011 photos in their entirety, by month, and have completed the album pages from January - July. Its been a fairly quick process once I go organized and also figured out you can import photos into Costo from Picasa which is amazingly quick and saves a step since I already use Picasa as my way to organize & share our photos.








I have actually really enjoyed going back through out older pictures and reminiscing as I make these books. Ben & I have gotten some great laughs, and its fun to see how Weston resembles Jackson when he was younger.
I know we will treasure these albums for years to come, and that helps motivate me to document as much as I can!




On a video note, I am so blessed to have a private videographer (Mom) who takes tons of video when we are around, but also takes the footage from our iPhones, iPads & video camera and edits, creates chapters, menus, etc., then burns us DVDs. We have an entire album of home movie DVDs that Mom has kept current for us. We are so thankful for that and the kids love to watch them fairly often.
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