A few years ago NPR profiled a woman who had created a scrapbook page for every single day of her then five year-old daughter's life. At the time of the story, she was pregnant (unexpectedly, I assume) with her second child and was in a real dilemma. Recording every day of her child's existence was an important undertaking for her. And yet, she was certain she would not have the time, energy, or creativity to chronicle the daily lives of two children. And so, she was distraught about what to do. Should she stop altogether? Focus on the new baby? Create a joint scrapbook. It was unclear how she would proceed.
I'm sure it's been more than four years since that story aired, but it has stuck with me. For someone who rarely manages to take her children's picture and is woefully behind in filling out their baby books, the idea of creating a scrapbook for every day of a child's life is pretty mind boggling. I might go far as as to call it um... a bit crazy. At first I wondered how you could find something worth commemorating about every. single. day. But then I realized, making sure you had something to scrapbook would always be on your mind. It might even dictate how you lived. You wouldn't necessarily think, "let's go to jazz story time today." Instead you'd think, "what a great scrapbook page I can make if we go to jazz story time." Before you even got there,you might be picturing musical note accents, and framing the kind of picture you'd want to capture. In a weird way, you could end up living your life to fit a scrapbook.
This woman and her scrapbooking came to mind again now that I'm trying to blog, because I've realized, in a way, blogging has the same potential. I'm wondering, to what extent, I'm turning my life into bloggable posts. So today, when I dropped off Silly Sally in her new classroom at daycare, I left thinking, "ooohhh, I wonder if her first day in the two year old room will give me something to write about." And that just seems kind of weird. Obviously I am not blogging enough to make every day of our lives poignant, or amusing, or thought-provoking. And I'm not really seeing this blog as a record of our lives, even though I know mostly family reads it and are interested to know how the children are doing. In many ways, I'm still working this thing out, figuring out what purpose I want it to serve. And maybe I just have to keep working at it to get a better idea of what that purpose might be.
(For the record, Sally loved her new classroom. And there's not much more to the story than that.)
