When I (Amy) was little, my mom used to take me to scrapbook parties. You maybe didn’t even know such a thing exists, but they do. And they’re actually pretty serious business. A group of moms would get together and bring their patterned paper, whimsical stickers and stacks of printed photographs, roll up the sleeves of their denim blouses (you know you had one) and spend hours at a time creating true works of art with their pictures. Hours would be poured into cropping each printed photograph with scissors and laying out each photo with special non-acidic adhesives. There were no short cuts. Digital was still a word reserved for clocks, Windows ’95 and beepers.

I, as a fourth grader, would spend hours with these women, and cut my own little photographs of things like recess, Girl Scout meetings and my cat, and carefully assemble my own scrapbooks. In fact, I was so committed, I kept them going, and had a personalized scrapbook every year until I became a junior in high school. And then I got a driver’s license. And AP classes. And enough hours at the dance studio to make anyone believe I lived there. And my meticulously hand-made scrapbooks got pushed to the wayside.

When Jordan and I got married, I made a vow to find a solution to keeping my own life documented in a format that didn’t include denim blouses and Saturdays with a mom’s club. And finally, I decided to give in, and go digital. It was the best decision I could have made. I design the books myself, and while they aren’t nearly the quality of a leather-bound wedding album, they’ve become a prized possession in our home. Friends will come over and ask,” Is the 2011 book done yet?? Did I make the book??,” and it’s become such a perfect way for me to make sure I’m not forgetting about our own memories while we work to capture everyone else’s. And while I’ve swapped my swirly-edged scissors for the click of a mouse, I still feel just as proud of them as I did back then.