a bookshelf of memories.

growing up we had bookshelves of family photo albums in our living room. you know, the big brown binder kind with the pull away sleeves and sticky backs. i often wonder how much of my childhood i actually remember and what i just think i remember because i've looked through these albums so many times.

either way, i'll take it. i love that i have books full of photos of my parents, my brothers and the hundreds of vacations we've taken together. of birthday parties and sporting events, getting my ears pierced, the day my braces came off (and what i looked like in headgear), talent shows, milestone moments, helping mom bake and our awkward fashion choices over the years. i guess i always took for granted how awesome it was to have these photos all organized in one place. because of them, danny's had the chance to dive into my history and get a visual feel for who i am and where i came from. it's really fun.

for years now, i've struggled with photo organization. i take thousands of photos but between the shoe boxes of unlabeled and unorganized photos from college to the handful of external hardrives filled with folders of .jpeg files, i've always had an unsettling feeling about where these would all end up one day.

of course photos are fun to look at now, but in the future they'll be more important than ever.

i've decided that a new goal for our life is to mock my dad's system and have one album a year. i dream of a bookshelf of hardback coffee table books each labeled by a single year on their spine. reasons why...
a. it's more fun to look through printed photos, and even more so books of photos.
b. inevitably we (especially my husband) will forget who, what, where and why we were taking these pictures.
c. technology can't be trusted. hardrives eventually will crash.
d. because i'm a little old fashioned when it comes to this stuff.
e. i secretly dream of us (and our kids) being able to look back on our history one day. i want them to know exactly who their parents are.

so, ehhh i'm a few years behind but had to start somewhere (currently the goal is to go back to 2008 - the year we got engaged but ideally i'd love to go back and make one book for college and then each year since graduation). with my recent day off, i managed to get 2011 current and am 90% done with 2010. most of the photos are there and i'm finalizing the brief event descriptions. it helps that i'm pretty good about organization on my computer and can just drop each event into the project (extra-large 100-page books... i love my macbook pro).

now that i'm motivated and have the template, moving forward i'm hoping to build the book gradually throughout each year so it's not such a cumbersome process come december.

not gonna lie, i'm really excited. and as my dad said, now all i have to worry about for the books is a fire

(which given my history with household disasters, isn't that unrealistic of a thought).

i'm really excited for my time off around the holidays to knock out a couple more years.