Preserving Family Memories

My friends make fun of me for printing pictures in 2015. Not just one cute picture of my daughter but hundreds a year, or at least 100 per year I should say. I feel like I am of a dying breed in this digital world but I know I’m not alone!

Growing up I would spend hours on the weekends going through my mom’s collection of family photos. I never got tired of them. I never got sick of the stories either. I feel like this is a dying art though. People now have Facebook and Instagram to share their pictures. Gone are the days when people didn’t know what was going on in your life until you showed them the photos but it’s something I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon, especially since I can tell my daughter, at only three, is already as into photographs as I was as a child.

What kills me though is how expensive this hobby can be! Though you can still have photos printed for cheap- if you wait for sales- everything else is very expensive. I recently capitalized on Costco’s $0.10 print sale and needed a new album to hold everything. Though I haven’t yet given up, the cheapest album I could find for the size I wanted, was over $25.

Preserving family memories is a delicate art for me. I want to keep everything but I hate clutter. I like printing pictures and holding them more than relying on digital only, though a 100% digital life, including memory preservation, is always an option (I also love my digital photo frame).

In terms of kid’s crafts, I have to choose. For any special occasion she will bring home two to five crafts and we just don’t have the space to keep it all. Instead I sometimes will take a picture of the ones we’re not keeping- or ones that are super large and won’t fit in storage and place the photos with the box of items we have opted to keep. I have also heard of parents not keep anything and instead taking a picture of it instead.

For our wedding photos, I had photobooks made which were really nice but had their limitations. For one, they were much more expensive than printing and as well we had to be choosier in what photos we wanted in there due to their sizing limitations. I like printing pictures and not fussing about the page layout and every other detail that goes into making the photobooks though I do still really like them, especially if you score a great promo price!

Some people would argue that these sorts of ‘memory preservation’ are a waste of money, to each their own I guess. For me having a cupboard full off overflowing photo albums is happiness and more memories as I look forward to the day she crawls into my lap and asks all about that day we did ‘’x’’ before she was born.

How do you preserve your memories?

Catherine

Catherine is a first time momma to a rambunctious toddler. When she isn’t soaking up all that motherhood has to offer, you can find her blogging over at Plunged in Debt where she chronicles her and her husbands journey out of debt. You can also follow her on Twitter.