Why?

If you're wondering why I issued this challenge... it's because sometimes we need the motivation to get out of a slump. Two pregnancies, breastfeeding, and not getting an uninterupted night's sleep in 3 years has left me with precious few brain cells. I sometimes need someone to tell me how to arrange my photos because I just don't have a clue how to get started.

Back in the fall, Mom and I were commiserating because neither of us had scrapbooked since the last scrapbook day we'd attended. It had been over a month. A month without scrapbooking doesn't seem like much, but for me... that's quite a few pictures sitting in an envelope not being looked at. Sometimes I'm on and I do tons of pages, other times I don't look at my albums for weeks. I tend to fall further and further behind. Just because I'm not putting my photos in albums doesn't mean I'm also taking a break from taking photos... so the backlog gets bigger. So I challenged Mom to complete a page using one of our tools and said that we could compare our pages when we got together on the weekends, hoping this would help us get back into the groove, and enthusiastic again. We did this for 2 or 3 weeks and then it just died. Imagine how many more pages I'd have done now if I kept it up weekly since then! Maybe an album's worth!

So... my challenge a week is a surefire way to complete up to 52 layouts (104 pages) in a year - with miminal thinking on your part! If a week is too frequent, we can do a layout every two weeks or even monthly, but I think a double layout a week is manageable. For me it's skipping an episode or two of Law and Order before bed. I am going to use these challenges (starting next week) to handle my "backlog". Everytime I fall too far behind I stop working on the old photos and start from the present day... which has left me with a few incomplete albums and a few boxes of photos sorted but not cropped. My 2007 album and Connor's baby book are current up to the beginning of June --- which isn't too bad at all. I'll continue to plow through 2007 when I'm cropping on my own, but I will use these challenges to plug away at the "older" albums.

I'm looking forward to it, and looking forward to our next challenge, which I believe Mom will be sending out!

Happy Scrapping!

Laura