Scrapbooking

From what I gather, there comes a time in every mother's life when she begins to scrapbook. This often begins with filling out a baby book and then spirals out of control, until entire rooms in the house are devoted to accommodating this hobby.

While I stand guilty as charged of keeping the obligatory baby album, I have only been dragged into full Monty scrap booking by family. In my defense, I say that this isn't even for me, but for a cousin who's expecting his own child.

After putting it off as long as I could, and getting the admonitory e-mail that I was slacking, I dragged myself to craft store heaven Michael's. The plan was simple - get the properly sized page, a few festive stickers and high-tail it out of there for some gluing fun.

How naive I was...

Michael's swallowed me up like the Bermuda Triangle, leaving me lost in a sea of paper patterns, stickers, appliques, ribbons and all sorts of other doo-dads I know not the name or function of. And the cost of it all! Who are these millionaires with no responsibilities who find the time and the unlimited funds seemingly necessary to pursue this unnatural hobby?

I looked at some of the (unbelievably expensive) scrap booking idea books for inspiration, and learned that to do this correctly, I must be prepared to build lots of layers on my page, print sappy one-liners in funky fonts on newsprint and, most importantly, buy lots and lots of the expensive crap that one glues to the pages to make them more "meaningful."

After what seemed like hours, I limped out with 2 sheets of paper and 3 packages of stickers, leaving my pride and nearly $15 inside the store. What followed at home was another 2 hours of laying out and printing photos, assembling all my design elements, a few Internet searches on how we are actually related to the baby-to-be (Is my husband's cousin's future kid my second cousin? My first cousin once removed? My cousin-in-law? And what about Otter's relationship to all these folks? Thank god for Wikipedia!), and finally, some double face photo tape gluing fun!!! All for ONE PAGE!!!

Lest I sound too bitter, I was happy to do it. I think it's a great idea for the baby to have these pages to look back on, to actually know how his or her father's cousin's baby is related, and to know that an entire extended family put in the work and creativity to welcome him/her to the world. And truth be told, I at the end of the day, I kind of enjoyed putting the page together.

Hmmmm.... Perhaps I should take out a home equity loan and start Otter's scrapbook next...