How to scrap the scrap! Especially if you have Children….

Ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of paper you have around the house? When it comes to the digital age your life should be much simpler right? Well in most cases it’s not. There are more password combinations to remember and more bookmarks to set, which sometimes can be more difficult than keeping track of paper.

As a military spouse we move ever few years and with each move we acquire more STUFF! I swear with each move we sell over 1/3 of our stuff but I don’t think it’s enough. Trying to be a minimalist as a military family is tough for a few reasons; you want each home you move into to feel like you have lived there forever so the reality of your uprooting isn’t so present. If you are a military family with children the minimalist lifestyle seems further out of your reach. There are toys, pictures, memories, and MORE TOYS!

BABY STEPS!

I have started to become a more organized and digital person so when we do move I don’t lose paperwork or important crafts my wonderful kids have made. This started with small baby steps.

Baby step #1-Capturing keepsakes in a digital format – Keep a central location for your kids crafts and you can sort them by each child. I typically will collect school drawings, graded homework and any other cool crafty things they have made for about a month. Then each month I will take about an hour out of a weekend day and place each item on a solid area as a background such as my dark kitchen table or counter top. Then one by one I will snap a photo of each item with my iphone or if I feel really professional I will pull out my Nikon 5200. But mostly I will admit it’s my iphone!

Once I have all the items captured in a photo I will take them all and walk them over to the GARBAGE can…. yes you read that right… I throw them all away. Because quite frankly with 4 kids with the oldest being 23, I would have boxes and boxes of crafts, graded homework and CUTE stuff they made.

I have a subscription to CHATBOOKS and the best part is I can upload all the pictures I just took to the app on my phone and VIOLA! A book will magically print and make its way in the mail to me and as I flip through the book I can reminisce over all of their cute little things they made or accomplished. These small books are neatly placed on a bookshelf and don’t take up much room, and they are bound very nicely and the pages are soft like butter…. don’t ask me why but they are and I love to run my fingers over the page as I browse.

Now some of you may freak out at the fact that I just toss all of my kids cute artwork into the trash but what I forgot to mention is I don’t chuck it all….. you know the cute little hand and foot crafts they do in primary school, I keep those. Why? Because it’s their little feet and hands and I can see how they grow through the years and they can physically see their little bitty hands when they are 23 and look at you like your a crazy hoarder with all their hands and feet in a box! HA!…. They will understand when they are parents is what I tell myself.

So be selective with what you feel comfortable tossing, but quite frankly I don’t need 30 different scribble line drawings that look the same but have different titles in a box to move around every 3 years. Those I can look at in my CHATBOOKS!

Below is a code to get your first CHATBOOK and please share the code with all of your friends and family so you can all make that baby step to become more organized and scrap the scrap.

Get your Chatbook here.