Aging Gracefully

Today my oldest, a daughter, celebrates her 30+ birthday. Our youngest, a son, turned nineteen a few weeks ago. Now that we have four grandchildren I am in the process of aging gracefully. This is really a mis-nomer as I think there is nothing such as aging gracefully. We all have our bumps in the road and sometimes they are major pitfalls.

In honor of my children and to accomplish a long time goal of mine, I am in the process of redoing the family picture albums. There are about twenty years of pictures not in albums, but I will deal with those after I finish the albums. As the family historian and genealogist there really is no excuse for this situation. The best I can say is that the last twenty years have been filled with raising a family of six children. Now that the youngest has graduated from high school it is time for me to get caught up.
For my oldest daughter's birthday present I am doing her albums first. Today I finished one album. I am transferring pictures from those old sticky page albums with the clear plastic pages. Some of the pictures have faded due to the materials in these pages. It is a tug of war to get some of the pictures off the pages, but they are coming off. Now I am placing them on acid free paper, using acid free picture corners, in acid free clear sheet protectors and into albums.
My next step is to scan each page, photocopy the pages for a paper copy for me and then give the originals to my children. I still have the negatives, but they are not organized in any useful manner.
The three daughters are married and so they may get their albums first. It is time to pass on to the next generation the treasures of their childhoods. It has been fun to look back and reflect on the wonderful memories of watching each of my children grow to adulthood.
This blog in the future will focus more on my genealogy projects with some of our own family history interspersed.
The challenge for anyone reading this is to work on the photo projects for your own collections and store them in a manner that they can be appreciated and enjoyed.
Now I am off to celebrate Easter and over thiry years of being a mother.
Hope you have a wonderful day with family and friends and make some more precious memories.
Sue