What's Really Important?

 I enjoy listening to the Paperclipping Roundtable podcasts when I go on my daily walks.  It always feels like I'm right there in the room discussing my favorite topic with them.  One particular discussion has made me stop to think.  A lady wrote in saying that her husband and kids have no interest in her scrapbooks and so she scrapbooks for herself without the intention of them ever being preserved for future generations.  That made me sad to hear but it also got me thinking.  Which of my layouts will be the important ones to my family.  Will they fight over who gets my books in a good way or a bad way (like who gets stuck with them)  I think I probably changed my focus about five or so years ago with my scrapping.  I no longer feel a need to scrap every picture and every event.  I think it was Rebecca Sower's "Life's Little Treasures" book that started to change my thinking and then Stacy Julian with "The Big Picture" and "Photo Freedom", and I then started to evaluate "What's really important?"  I know how to scrapbook artsy and perfectly designed scrapbooks.  I keep up with the latest trends of papers and tools.  I read the blogs and the message boards and educate myself on all things scrapbook related, but when you get right down to it?  Will they ever look at my layouts and say..."I love the embellishments she used on this" or "That's last year's Basic Grey line."  They look at them now and have no clue if I have a visual triangle or odd numbers of elements on the page.  What they care about is the memory.  The pictures and the story are what are important in the big scheme of things.  So lately, I've been taking a new approach and not trying to see how many volumes of beautiful pages I can create about our lives because, let's face it, would I like to have to store 40+ scrapbooks from my Mom plus my own pictures and memories?  Probably not.  What would mean more to me than anything is to have a few books that tell me about her life and the pictures and stories from our lives with her that meant the most.  I would love to hear about my grandparents and what they loved and how they spent their days and how much things cost for them in comparison to what we pay now.  It's really kind of freeing to let go of the guilt of how far behind I am with scrapping every story.  So I'm taking Stacy's approach from Photo Freedom and have rearranged my layouts into themes of "What we Love to Do",  People we love,  Places We Go, etc etc.  I have an album for each kid with all the highlights from their lives and an album or two on Russ and I and things we do together.  My focus at this point is on my heritage book so my kids can identify who my aunts and uncles and grandparents were when they receive the older pictures.  I'm also focused on my "me at 50" album and plan to do another one in ten years and will continue to work on my overall Book of Me and tell my stories from childhood that my kids won't know unless I record them.  I will always have little projects to keep me busy but I no longer feel the need to see how many pages I can kick out in a year.  I'm just taking my time, enjoying my hobby and keeping my focus on what really matters.