I think I can

When I make a summer task list, it always includes "put pictures in albums." My usual tactic is to take a year's worth of photos at a time and pop them into an album in the summer, when life is a little slower. Last summer I did the uploading part and the ordering part, but I never got around to the sticking-down-in-albums part. 

This caused me mounting dread. Two years' worth of pictures is a lot of pictures. I've dug myself out of that hole before, but one begins to wish for Mike Mulligan to get out of his cellar and steam to the rescue. (That would probably cause some structural issues for the town hall, though.)

My approach to albums is pretty simple. I don't buy card stock or stickers and I don't own a corner-rounder and I have never in my life made a spread like the ones in the Creative Memories materials. But I get the photos into the albums with captions as appropriate (usually after some complaining about it on the blog), and the kids love to look through them later. 

I love having done the task. I loathe doing it.

I knew that being behind wouldn't be as bad this time as it was when the kids were smaller. We take fewer pictures. Joe was asking me about this recently, why we have fewer pictures now, and I told him that in our family we usually take three types of pictures:

1. Somebody is doing something that makes me smile, often involving a book. (Seriously, we have so many pictures of kids poring over books.)
2. Somebody is celebrating an occasion with a cake or other festive food.
3. Somebody is going somewhere memorable and we get pre-departure pictures. (We usually forgot to take the camera along, back in the days when we had no phone cameras or only bad phone cameras.)

These days everybody is more grown up and so we have fewer goofy moments. People are more likely to get themselves to their own memorable destinations under their own steam, and so we seem to take fewer pictures of them heading out the door.

At least there will always be cake.

(Exhibit A: a Dobos torte made mostly by Joe for Easter 2018. Doesn't it look celebratory?)

I have now sequenced and organized and stuck down and captioned all the 2017-2018 pictures, which felt like A Job. I have uploaded and ordered and juuuust about finished sequencing the 2018-2019 pictures. I can do this. I don't especially want to, but I can do this.