I have been making great strides on my "family history" scrapbook these last few weeks. You will notice I put the family history part in quotes because it is really the most cursory of histories. Mostly notes that go with the pictures. Things like: "Here is son#3 eating a donut in his highchair, we lived at such and such a house on such and such a stree and that is the old fruit dryer we used to have in the background." That sort of thing.
Only thing is, I can only stand so much of it at a time.
It is a very complicated thing to look at your life telescoped like that in chronological order. Family members that are gone now, cute little babies that have grown up and moved away, looking at how much I have changed, and all the stages of life that have been survived.... well, it can get downright depressing.
I got up to the page where it is time to add Robbie to our family last night, and I just had to stop. I realized that I had three times as many pictures picked out of him as I had of my own kids. I fretted about that for a while, thinking I was some kind of unnatural mother or something, then I realized.... shoot, my kids are in 80% of the pictures of Robbie! They grew up with him too....
Photos are kind of icky in some ways. They capture this moment in time, and we look at them and remember whatever joy or sorrow they remind us of. And if it's joy, you are sad that it's over, and if it's sorrow, you wonder how you lived through it.... Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I have them. I'm just saying, they are a mixed blessing, for me anyway.
Some days I think I am just WAY off on the oversensitive end of the spectrum.
(SOME days?)
Okay, okay, most days.
It's a habit I am trying to change.
God gave me skin.
I need to work on making it a little tougher.
In the meantime however, I have run out of decorative paper for the scrapbook pages, I want to haul over to Costco where I saw a whopping big stack of it for a pretty good price, that is so huge it should last me for the rest of my scrapbooking career.
But today I have to go to work. So shopping will have to wait.
So will the 5 pages of pictures of Robbie who is no longer among us, in various poses surrounded by my kids, who aren't kids any more, taken in places that we don't live in anymore either..... sniff.....
Oy.
Where is that Brillo pad? I need to start on that skin toughening regimen.
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