So, you may want to prepare yourself for some cheese. See those boxes? They contain the collective memorabilia Bret and I have gathered from our lives - some of it predating even ourselves. We're both fairly sentimental, with Bret ranking as more sentimental than me, so we've kept stuff. Stuff like journals and newspaper articles and old driver's licenses and every card we got when Lou was born and wedding invitations and baby announcements and funeral programs. We've got it all in here. Crammed together. Shots of our exes are living in the same box (I just don't believe in throwing that stuff away, and I have a plan for it), along with letters - actual, handwritten letters! - from friends who are still besties and cranking out handwritten stuff, and some who aren't even at Facebook level anymore. It's a cornucopia of stuff, all mushed together, and it was time to introduce some organization, purge if necessary, and possibly save some space along the way. First things first: I sorted.

I didn't throw anything away at this point, other than empty envelopes or other clearly-recognized trash. Following my general two-step organization principle, first I sort down and then I tackle purging and organizing things in smaller bite-sized chunks. If you, too, have inexplicably hoarded life's mementos in an atmosphere of utter chaos, you'll have different categories. But roughly, here's what we've got:

• Holiday cards
• Random cards (birthday, thank you)
• Announcements & Programs (wedding, birth, funeral)
• Academic stuff (both B and I have kept theses and prized papers.)
• Lou's cards (shower/birth, first and second birthday. Really.)
• Journals (I have like five, with about five pages each actually written on. None of my adolescent musings are worth preserving. But this was not purge time. Yet.)
• Bret's family photos
• My family photos
• Bret's friends photos and mementos
• My friends photos and mementos
• Former students/mentees photos and mementos
• Bret & Me stuff  (the handcrafted landmarks of our romance :) (here's where you should prepare for cheese)
• Lou stuff  (a huge would-be scrap book, if I scrap booked, of Lou pics)
• Lou art
• New baby stuff (the rather absurd number of ultrasound pics we've already collected)

So those are the categories, and that's what my dining table looks like right now. To proceed, I needed materials. How was I going to put this stuff together in a way that wasn't just shoving it all back into a box? I thought long and hard about what made sense for us, and here's what I came up with.

Some things to note: This crap is expensive. I first went to Target for a photo album and they're like $20! Minimum! So that was out, because I needed a bunch of stuff. I did pick up the accordion file folders there, in their dollar section, and you can always find those at dollar stores. I then checked Marshall's and Burlington, which may sometimes have stuff like this, but didn't. So finally, I headed to our local "dollar" store, which is really just the world's most confusing discount store - you wouldn't believe some of the stuff they carry, in sometimes suspiciously small and finite quantities, if you get my drift - and found (ugly) photo albums and kid's art portfolios for $6 each. Knowing what I know now, I urge you to start at the dollar store, and move up if you have to.

Also, I had a series of goals here. First, I want to keep stuff that's really meaningful to us. We're no minimalists, even if I stress out about space a lot. We've dragged a lot of this stuff through 8 houses together: it's staying. But I wanted it not to sit in a box no one ever saw. Where's the fun in that? Instead, I wanted easily-accessible ways to actually keep this stuff on hand, where someone might actually appreciate it. This goes to the idea of whether or not to digitize stuff. I understand that impulse, but I find it's just like storing stuff in a box in an attic. When are you ever going to look at that again? (Services like this, which turn digitized images into physical books, are a different story). Second, I wanted things to not only be accessible, but to be narrative. I want you to be able to get a sense of time and change from the way we put things together. Third and fourth, I need things to be able to grow with us, as we continue to collect stuff, and to be fairly uniform: I don't want 20 differently-sized photo albums that don't look nice on a bookshelf together.

I think these materials will help me meet those goals:

1. Kid Art Portfolios. I should start off by noting that I'm really not a scrap-booker. I've tried. After all, scrap booking is all about building a narrative around life events, which I'm into. But it's just not my bag. My Lou's First Year scrap book, sitting woefully unfinished on the table with everything else, is ample testimony to that fact. So I didn't want scrap books. But I did want places to put more than just photos. We tend to make each other cards and write each other notes; we both exchanges actual letters and artwork and stuff with friends, we treat tickets to shows and similar mementos as important reminders of good times. I think, together, all that stuff tells a story. But how to tell it without breaking out the scalloped heart punch? When I found these portfolios at the dollar store, I bought them out. They only had those three. But they were perfect: basically just scrapbooks, they offer 8x 12" pages where you can insert anything you like. I think of them as offering me an opportunity to scrap book lite, which you'll see in a sec.

2. Accordion File Folders. Ironically enough, I don't keep my kid's art in those kid's art portfolios. I keep it in these accordion files, as I've talked about here. These are also good places to put bulkier items, like newspapers and graduation tassels and so forth. More on that in a future post.

3. Key rings. We keep a lot of greeting cards, especially the holiday ones with photos and stuff. I plan to put them on key rings so we can easily flip through them.

4. Photo albums.  Hopefully self-explanatory. Yes, this one is ugly, but that's always fixable. I like that it's a standard size, so I'll be able to collect them over time and still have things look uniform.

So, let's start where I started: With one of those kid's artwork portfolios. I used it for the story of Sam and Bret. I know, I know, the cheese. I'm sorry. But for me, this is how things make sense. I like the idea of opening this up and seeing early pics of us and first birthday cards and wedding photos and honey moon keepsakes. Here's a sample of the pages:

This looks a little scrap-booky, right? But it took no time at all. I slid the stuff into sleeves in rough chronological order, and there are lots of pages left. The middle page is wedding invitations, if you're curious. Shockingly - shockingly - we made our wedding invitations. I thought they were cute - a bunch of cakes - and I asked people to bring theirs to the wedding so I could keep them (and we could see them all together, which was how they were cutest. Especially after the bows fell off a bunch of the cards. Bret's aunt also made us a cool mini quilt with some of them, which was awesome). The other pages are probably self-explanatory and cringing-ly personal.

But I love them. This aspect of the memorializing project took so little time and the result is just what I was aiming for. I'm looking forward to doing the next two books this way, and and to diving into the other ideas I have for the rest of it. Oh, and the cover of the book still says "My Art Work." I just haven't figured out how I'll redo these yet, but that's in the works, too.

How do you corral and keep all this stuff? Or do you file it in the specialist filing bin, the trash can? Thanks as always for reading, and I'll see you tomorrow!