Hi! I’m Maggie. I’m a wife, mom of 2 (3 year old and 3 month old), I work full time, manage a house hold and we’re currently building a house (and living in an RV! More to come on that…). So the day-to-day is a little busy.

I’m sure that sounds familiar – everyone is swamped in this season of life! And I’m not complaining, it’s good to be busy. My problem is I want to capture the sweetness/chaos/beauty of this time so when things slow down my family and I can look back at our memories, our ‘souvenirs of life’.

I take pictures, but they stay on my phone. I don’t feel comfortable posting too much on social media and I don’t have anywhere to put them if I were to print them out, so they stay on the cloud.

Recently I’ve been asking myself: what is the best way to capture the memories my family is making? How do I catalog them so they’re available for the next generation to access and keep sharing and enjoying?

There are ways I can think of currently:

  • Scrapbooks like my mom used to labor over, for which I’m so grateful, and is a big inspiration for this project. Most times when I go to my childhood home I’ll pull a book off to remember a point in time that she painstakingly recorded. I’ll sit on the floor or on the couch under a blanket to reminisce.
  • Videos, which my mom was also good at. The family camcorder came on vacations, birthdays and special occasions. Now we pull out our phones, but how can I string those quick clips together into a meaningful memory?
  • Printing photos: it’s so easy! But are my iphone6 photos good enough quality to be intriguing to a generation that is so accustomed to beautiful photography?

And then there’s the other considerations such as:

  • Storage: I have bins of mini VHS tapes filled with footage my parents took that are degrading in a storage container. How do I transfer those so I can save them, use them in the future and share with the rest of my family?
  • Memorabilia aka Discernment: what are the keepsakes that are worth keeping? And what can go into the bin? This is a personal conundrum, but a fascinating question that is coming up more and more as boomers are leaving their kids with an inheritance that no one wants the emotional guilt of throwing away. Oftentimes, things can be tossed with minimal repercussions. But how to know when to toss my baby’s Thanksgiving finger painted turkey?!?! This is a fascinating article on the Boomer ‘Stuff Avalanche’ of items being handed down, and the burden (financially and emotionally) it places on their kids (and makes me more keen to toss things, or better yet, not buy them in the first place!).
  • History: There is something to be said about the historical aspect of memories, too. I am sure my kids will some day say ‘What is a land line?’ ‘You had to get on the internet HOW?’. That will be fun! I love seeing what we wore, the cars we drove, the technology (or lack thereof) in our hands in the photos when I was growing up. I want my children to look back and share those memories of a time gone with their kids, too.

Capturing memories is a way to showcase LIFE, this beautiful gift we’ve been given. Time marches on, fashions change, technology advances, and the way of life we had yesterday will change tomorrow.

My hope with this project is to share things that do or don’t work for me, whether that’s a medium for capturing and sharing memories, a tool I find useful or just encouragement for you to keep at it. Selfishly, this is a way to motivate myself to work harder at something I want to make a priority.

Thanks for being here. After all is said and done, having memories worth looking back on is such a gift. So let’s make memories, the great souvenir of life!