Let's try that again...

I am so bad at keeping up this posting lark!  My friend Karen has really put me to shame this month by journalling all the fantastic things she's being doing in preparation for Christmas with her two children and I envy her blog .... is that a new "sin" - blog envy? LOL

So I am going to make a New Year resolution to attend to this blog  much more, take more photos to blog about and write more about what's going on in my life to remind me when I'm older.

One thing that made me think about having reminders of my past is visiting my grandparents who have recently moved in to a care home.  They used to live with my parents and since they couldn't take a lot of stuff with them to the home my mum and dad have spent the last month trawling through masses of papers and photos (my grandad is a bit of hoarder to say the least - we even found the notes he made about how to use the guns whilst on board ship during WW2!).

Dad has gone through literally thousands of photos all neatly stacked in their little packets - mainly of back gardens in houses none of us remember, cakes and meals laid out for special occasions we can't remember and the odd one or two of people who we don't know the names of.  In the end he kept the ones of people we did know and just had to throw out the rest.  However, photos are still a big part of our family and as a Christmas present for my grandparents this year I have made them a little stand with pages of photos that flip over so they can see different pictures whenever they feel like it (bearing in mind they don't have much room in their new home to display many things).  I went through my photos on my drive and picked 12 that span mainly over our daughter's life (14 years now!) making sure they all had family members in them.

When we visited Gran and Boo Boo today he liked the photos but my Gran seemed fascinated by them.  She suffers from Alzheimers and her memory has been getting steadily stuck in the past - she took these photos and looked and looked and looked - every time she got to the end, she went back to the beginning and went through them again. She didn't ask any questions as to who the people were so I think she recognised them but it was as if she was willing herself to remember the events around the photos.  it made me realise how fragile our memories can be and how important it is to scrapbook, journal, blog and write about what we are doing now so we can remember it in the future.  Our lives are made up of moments that make us smile, laugh, cry, come together as family and friends or just be alone with beautiful views and thoughts but if we don't capture them what is left?

Allie with Gran Gran

Allie with Boo Boo