Penny slept last night, huzzah! She started to wake up a couple of times, then gave up and went back to sleep on her own. She didn't get up for the day until 6:30, just as Matt and I were thinking it was time for us to wake her up anyway.

I'm all for encouraging her to sleep in.

Is it especially sad that 6:30 seems luxuriously late? I guess it will give us something to appreciate about her teenager years.

I've got a plan for my next two scrapbooks, finally. Since I finished Grandmom's Christmas album, I've known of a few albums I want to do, but I've felt kind of paralyzed and unable to actually do anything to start them.

Yesterday I finally managed to sort through our wedding pictures and memorabilia and get it all in some semblance of order. Today, I plan to start doing some trimming. When I tried to make a scrapbook shortly after our wedding, I more or less ruined a bunch of pictures, trying to crop them cleverly. Most of them, I think, will be recoverable, but I'll need to crop them even closer. Thank goodness I eventually gave up on the clever trimming and switched to simple rectangles.

I'll also start the weeding process. I've got eight pictures of Matt and I coming down the aisle together; I think I can afford to toss the one where we're so blurry you can barely distinguish Matt from a shadow. I should have tossed it long since, but early on, I was so sentimental about everything to do with the wedding that I didn't have the heart to get rid of the awful pictures.

My other project is a secret, because it's a gift for someone who I don't whether they read this or not. (See this box?) But I'm missing a lot of the pictures I need for that one anyway, so I need to contact the people who might have them to get copies. But I've got a couple of months before I need to really worry about it too much.

We were talking, at the scrapbooking workshop last weekend, how most of our husbands are kind of perplexed by this hobby. They don't understand its appeal. Matt, I think, is a little bemused by the enthusiasm with which I've thrown myself into it, though he hasn't yet mocked any of my projects, as some of the husbands had done. (He does tease me for the excitement with which I approach the task of organizing my Stuff, and probably deservedly so. I'm a little weird about rearranging and organizing things.)

But as I was pulling pictures out of my old photo albums, two things amazed me: The number of faces I recognized, faces that had once been dreadfully important to me - but whose names I could no longer recall; and the number of old stories and anecdotes that bubbled to the surface as I looked at those pictures, things I hadn't even thought about in years.

High school was less than twenty years ago. How much more will I forget in another twenty years, if I don't write these things down now?

Well, that, and the hobby gives me an excuse to indulge my not-so-secret passions for stickers and organizers, both at the same time!

--Liz