I have been an avid scrapbooker and photographer for decades. I have spent hours each week photographing my world around me, my children, our life together and scrapbooking the stories of our days. I have loved every minute of it and it has brought me so much joy and happiness. My family has loved it too – my children would often pull out their scrapbooks and browse through them as they happily relieved these memories. Memory keeping and documenting our lives has always been such a major part of my free time.

Until it wasn’t.

Somewhere along the way over the past couple of years, that creative spark and desire to record our lives just disappeared. Many things contributed to that loss of joy and capturing our life was no longer a priority, nor was it something that I wanted to document. My enthusiasm and fondness for scrapbooking and memory keeping dwindled and then simply vanished.

In some ways I didn’t realize this was happening and in other ways I didn’t care. Life was challenging enough without trying to force a mojo that just wasn’t there. But then the Month of Challenges started here at The Lilypad, and something in me was ignited. I started looking at the photos that I have taken. While not nearly as many as in past years, I was still pulling out my (phone) camera monthly to capture things around me. And in looking at those photos, I began to remember why I was driven to capture the moments of our life, what I was feeling and why that moment mattered. Thinking about documenting my life and telling stories in photos and words started to sound appealing once again!

Ever the overthinker, this led me to start analyzing what changed in my mindset and habits over the past couple of years and ultimately what really matters to me…which is scrapbooking the details of my life with my family and the world around me. So I’ve been contemplating on how to keep the rekindled mojo from MOC going…what projects excite me, what stories I want to tell, what photos I want to capture and most importantly: how much I want my family to know that our life matters.

Going forward in 2022, I’m making an effort to reconnect with my photos and words, my heartfelt memory keeping pages and projects, and documenting the bits and pieces of my life. That is where my heart is. Looking at my family that I love so much, and the ups and downs of our life together, is why I document our life and preserve our memories.

I started this month with a January-in-review layout. It is simple, exactly my style, and captures everything that matters to me. It is two 9×12” pages, to create a double page spread for the details our life in January. I will print these and put them in our family 2022 album. I can’t wait to continue to create these layouts each month and look back at our life in the years to come! I used Memory Pockets Monthly: Farewell, Memory Pockets Monthly Foundation 2021, and Valorie Wibbens Little Pockets No.6 to create this pocket page style spread.

If you have been struggling with your mojo or wondering how/where to begin to create, I encourage you to start with the highlights of your month! Just a few photos and some short stories or a summary of the month is all it takes to get you documenting – it is worth it because our stories and memories do matter.