Do You Have Precious Moments Preserved in Photos?

Just slightly behind the task I thought I would’ve completed at the end of 2022, I finally have selected a year’s worth of photos to print for a photo album of the year that has passed. At the start of last year, I imagined I’d create a digital photo album and have it printed into a book.

Probably not with 521 photos, I decided. It would cost half a million dollars and weigh 37 pounds. So I’ve settled on a physical slip-in photo album with a tiny journal box by each to at least name the person in the photo and the location.

When our children were young, I used to make fantastic scrapbooks each year, complete with photos and mementos of our enchanted days. As I began to take photos on memory cards and then on an iPhone, I rarely printed them out to compile in an album and in the device they sit.

So 2022 was the year I vowed to have an album through which we, our grown children, and their children can walk down memory lane as the pages are flipped. My youngest daughter suggested that each month I drop special photos on my phone into a digital folder so that at the end of the year all I’d have to do is edit out a few and order prints.

Sounds easy, right? Let’s just say that 521 photos is my pared-down number of photos. There are so many “firsts” with all of the little ones! Anyway, I think it’s an important thing for children to have a visual reference point through which they can walk back through their years. So much of life can be a blur, even with holidays and birthdays becoming indistinguishable, one from the next, without a clear timeline of events.

Not just kids, but all of us, in my opinion, need a clear timeline of the places we’ve gone, the things we’ve experienced, the people we spent time with, and the way we looked. Memories are precious and they are too easily lost or forgotten. Photos of everyday life, the first flower in spring, a toad in the creek, or a butterfly, are just as enchanting as any vacation in a faraway land.

I invite you to challenge yourself to plan for how you will record the special moments of this year ahead and honor them in a way that makes them last a lifetime.

Create some special moments and stay enchanted!