Thousands. Really...

So, I'm in the middle of a huge project and I've walked away from it for a week while I go to Snowbird. I'm organizing my photos. I have thousands of pictures that need to have a rhyme and a reason.

I bought a book a month or so ago by Stacy Julian, the "simple" scrapbooking guru. (side note: Doug's cousin, Hillary, is married to Stacy's brother, Cougar. Sometimes I see pictures of Hillary and Cougar in the magazines and books!)

Well, according to Stacy's system, I am to gather ALL of my pictures into one place. All the pictures in boxes and albums and drawers and envelopes, everything. So I did. Jake and Abbie helped me carry everything to the living room (emphasis on "living" because we do that in this room). And I checked that box off.




The next step is to put the pictures into decades, keep them in their envelopes or boxes, just get them into decades. That's where we are right now. A quick glance to see if MAYBE I wrote a date on the back and then plop! into the appropriate decade pile.



This is going to take a little time. I haven't even gotten close to the table with all the albums full of photos. A few years ago I decided to just put pictures in albums so that at least we could look at them. Get them out of a box and into an album! I didn't care about chronology, I just wanted them in a book. Because most of those photos are already dated that should go quickly.

Once the pictures are in decades I will go back and sort each decade into years. Then the years will get broken down to seasons. Then there is a whole system for filing the photos into groupings so you can see relationships between photos. I can't think about that part yet. I'm still working on decades.

And we're not suppose to look at the pictures while we're doing this first part, otherwise it is too easy to get bogged down. But we HAVE been looking! Each of the kids have been browsing through the stacks. I love that they are doing that. I think they're looking for pictures of themselves and I love it! I have plenty of pictures, nobody should feel left out! I have been telling them stories about the pictures, too. Look! There on the top of the pile are photos of my trip to Peru in 1976. And hey! There's Mt. Rushmore from last summer! Oh my, this is fun!

I do have to get this photo mountain under control. There was a time, a few years ago, when I stopped taking pictures because I didn't want anymore pictures to deal with. That's not a good thing to do. This system makes a lot of sense to me and so I'm going to try it. Maybe in a month or two I'll show you the results!