My Family's Collection (Part 3)

When I first started this blog back in 2008, I had written two blog posts about my family's collections. Originally, I had thought that we were a family who never collected anything, but I was soon proven wrong when I blogged about our movie & book collection.

The other day we were talking about how easy it is to accumulate stuff over the years, and not want to throw anything away because of the memories. I just randomly said, "If there was a fire in your house, and you could only grab about 10 things...what would you grab?" My mom quickly said, "My photo albums!!!"

I guess, technically, this blog should be entitled "My Mom's Collection" as she is the one who does all the work with the photo albums, but to continue on with the series, I will leave it with that title :)

One of my mom's most favorite things to do is to work on her photo albums. As of right now, she has about 30 books filled with - on average - 50 pages of pictures. The only ones that are less than that are our individual photo albums. There are photo albums for each of the kids, photo albums of vacations we have been on, and a whole bunch of general photo albums filled with random activities we have been involved in throughout the past many, many years.

These albums are not just filled with pictures of our family, mind you. If you have been friends with my family for any period of time, there is definitely a possibility that your smiling face shows up in 1 or 2 pages of one of these albums. If you are really curious, you could always leave a comment and I could look to see if I have a picture of you. ;-) Scary, isn't it???

These photo albums have been such a blessing. This past Christmas, we went through each of these books and found various pictures of us with our grandparents. Our gift to both sets of grandparents this year was a digital photo frame, where they could watch a slide show of pictures of their grandchildren. We were able to give both sides at least 100 pictures!! Little did I know how much that would mean to my Pop-Pop especially. Of course, I had no idea what the future held when I gave him that digital photo frame for Christmas. As his health continued to decline, he would just sit there in his chair, looking at all the pictures of his grandkids, remembering all the good times. At his funeral later on, Andy was able to put together a slide show of about 90 pictures of my Pop-Pop, just by browsing through all the photo albums and scanning them into the computer.

If I could sum it all into one word - it's all about the MEMORIES. Does it cost money, time and effort for my Mom to put these books together? Oh, yes. But you could NEVER put a price tag on all the memories - "Kodak Moments" - captured on the pages of these albums. And believe me, she is FAR from being done, as there are still many memories to be made! The only question is, Where do we store all these memories??? Sooner or later, we will be running out of room!!! :)

Right now, most of my memories are still being captured in my family's photo albums. However, I have started a small collection of my own - mostly filled with pictures of my kiddos and some trips I have been on. One day, when I have a family of my own, I hope to continue on with the photo album tradition my Mother has started. I know I won't regret it! :)