Why do I let myself get sucked into these things?

Until about a year ago, I was happily living in my little coccoon of the non-scrapbooking world. When we lived in Georgia, a fellow teacher had a Creative Memories party. I was thankfully able to get out of going because it coincided with some sort of family military function. After that it was probably another six or seven years before scrapbooking reared its ugly head. Each time I tried to duck. I tried to run. I tried to set their colorful paper and weirdly shaped scissors on fire.

And then...then we lost out on adopting a baby because I don't scrapbook.

So, grudgingly, I went to the store. I bought the minimum number of weirdly shaped scissors I could manage (that's 3 in case anyone wondered). I bought one album and one set of refill pages. I bought one little bound book of colored paper to use as backgrounds for my photos. Then I stuffed it all on a shelf and crossed my fingers that it would mysteriously disappear. Yet it didn't.

And then. Then we went on our first trip to Ireland. When we came home we had a TON of photos. And I wasn't working full time. And the scrapbooking stuff called to me like Odysessus' sirens. So I pulled it out and within a week had our trip safely documented on acid free paper with acid free pens making acid free captions under photos glued in place with acid free glue. Life was good. I could now say without it even being a smidgen of a lie that I scrapbooked. Cause I had.

Thinking the onerous chore was now complete, I stuffed the left over glue and scissors and pens in a drawer, tucked the photo album on a shelf and prayed fervently that I would never be inspired to do such an inane thing again.

And then. Then we went on our second trip to Ireland. When we came home we had a TON of photos. But this time I WAS working full time. And I only had the scissors and half a glue stick left over. But the other Ireland trip scrapbook called to me from the shelf - more like Edgar Allen Poe's Telltale Heart than any siren - and I knew in teh balls of my feet that I would have to make another scrapbook. So I trucked out to the store. I bought the stuff I needed. I came home and put it on the coffee table making a mental pledge that I would work on while I watched TV.

It is now December 18th. I am just about half-way done. And I'm ready to just start randomly gluing things on pages so I can be totally done. I can now say, without it being even a smidgen of a lie, that I despise scrapbooking. When I uploaded our photos in September I looked at their preprinted scrapbooks that you can order and scoffed at them. Now I wish I'd just coughed up the money rather than spending my nights hunched over 12x12 pages, fingers cramping from trying to use these dumb scissors that cut, admittedly pretty, designs down the sides of your papers and photos but somehow manage to transport you back to kindergarten - you know, when there were only lefty scissors left over and you just had to suck it up and try to make it work. The acid free glue is long gone...so these photos aren't stuck down with acid free glue. It's just good ol' Elmer's gluesticks - and I'm almost out of those. And when they're gone, I may just try out the honey we have upstairs. Cause it's sticky, right? I doubt it has acid in it too - so it might be better than the gluesticks.

The captions have disintegrated from flowery retellings of the stories that go with the photos to terse, 2 word descriptions that pretty much say things like "flowers" or "garden" and aren't goint to help posterity relive my trip. But you know what? I don't care. Posterity can just go to Ireland for themselves!

I have let myself get sucked, unwillingly, into this whole scrapbooking thing. And if I ever manage to get all the glue and little bits of paper unstuck from myself, I will stand on my porch like Scarlett O'Hara and declare, "As God is my witness, I will never make a scrapbook again!"