The plan was to group all the photos and memorabilia into bundles that can be pulled out and scrapbooked without much effort. I was finding I was getting stuck because I would find a photo and knew I had memorabilia somewhere to go along with it but it would take me too long to find it. Once I did, hours would have gone by and it was time to quit. That's just crazy in a bad way! I've since taken notes from Stacy Julian from Big Picture Scrapbooking (theme albums) and some tips from Cathy Zielski (school year albums) and Two Peas (bundling photos) on setting up my scrapbook room and scrapbooks. I no longer am trying to scrap in order. This has been so freeing for me! If you haven't checked them out I highly recommend you do if you are stuck in your mounds of photos with no idea of what to do. Stacy Julian has a new book coming out, which I can't wait!, which should give more tips on organizing.

So what motivated me to finish this? My family room bookshelves. We recently got our family room re-painted and for the first time I concentrated on how to display objects on the bookshelves. As I was working on this I realized that I had no books to put on there which was a problem because bookshelves with only tchotchke's and whatnots doesn't work - at least not for this space and the look I was wanting to accomplish. Since this is already a busy wall, I needed to soften the look and create something pleasing to the eye (best as possible), yet have it be functional too.

Now, I could go out and buy faux books to make the shelves work (all with matching spines for unity) but I don't like doing that. I really wanted to use what we already have. I'm working hard on eliminating stuff I don't need from our lives, keeping only the things we want or need, things with meaning and purpose. That's when I decided to bring down all our scrapbooks and see what that was like. I'm in the process of converting most of them to one color and that would look nice on the shelves. Here's a picture of the semi-finished result:







I'm pretty pleased with it. I've got artwork from our boys, pictures that mean something to us, scrapbooks that will eventually have more meaningful pictures in them and they are ready to be viewed and shared instead of stashed upstairs for no one to see. And for the most part the tchotchke's all have meaning to us (sand and shells from special vacations, a shadow box my mom made of my grandparents...) Makes me happy each and everytime I walk by. Still have some tweaking to do, need to finish the bottom of the shelves. I'm going to get some baskets to fill the bottom two rows and this is where I will store our CD's, DVD's, and magazines...

I now need to focus on creating more scrapbook pages to put into those albums! Unfortunately, most of the albums have A LOT of blank pages in each one. I've finally got myself set-up to really begin to accomplish getting pages done. The scrapbooks are set-up in themes (thanks Stacy!) and I've got page protectors already in place for each page. When I have time I can now go into my scrapbook room, pick out a bundle I want to do, complete the page and then go downstairs and immediately slip it under the page protector in the album it needs to go into. I'm no longer tacking them down into the album page so it gives me the freedome to change the order around or move them to different albums if I need to later. I've also decided that I might just complete a few 8 1/2 x 11 pages instead of my standard 12x12 pages. And, I'm breaking my old rule where I'm now planning on putting these smaller pages IN my 12x12 albums. Who cares! And further, I have decided to let go of my need to create each boy there own album along with our own albums. They will eventually get their pages but when I don't know yet, and that's ok. I know for sure they will get their pages after I die. If I'm nice I might give them to them before then, when they are married or whatever. Heck, I might decide to make color copies of the pages to give to them and I'll keep the orginals! I'm not sure how I will handle that but I've taken that pressure off of me! So go me!

Before I go, I wanted to share a couple funny pictures of our animals from the past couple days:



This was Zoe sleeping on our coffee table. This is the ONLY table she is allowed on (long story that I will spare you). Look how comfy she looks - so sweet.



Here's Oscar boy. I rounded the corner and spyed him sitting here so happy and content. (He's always happy and content!). Couldn't help but grab my camera when I realized he actually had his legs crossed. LOL - too funny!