I Think I Can, I Think I Can.....ENTER!

This announcement showed up in my inbox today, and I think that I am really going to enter this time. Last year, I wrote my essay and I worked on some layouts, and then I never got the guts to send it in. I believe this year I will try, and try hard! Anyone else up for the challenge? (ie: Sue, Candi, Lynn...I know you are reading this!)

Here is the essay I wrote last year about how scrapbooking has affected my life (don't mind the grammar, it is a little bit rusty):

It is 1:30 a.m. I am lying in bed, making a mental grocery list for the next day. A few moments later, I am thinking about possible layouts and making another list of creative supplies that I am going to need before I go to the grocery store for basic necessities. I am always thinking about scrapbooking; sometimes before breathing, and often before eating. I am always writing down possible titles for pages from the funny things my kids say and do, or grabbing my notebook while driving, because the chorus of a song will be perfect for some pictures that I took just last week. This is my life, and I am truly in love with it. As I have thought about how this personal hobby has affected my life, I think it is best to share this reason through an experience that happen just a few, short days ago.
I was finishing an album that I have been working on now and then for a few years. It is a small family album that has pictures of how my immediate family has grown in numbers of children and changed throughout the years. I am searching for pictures from when my husband and I had just our first child, a son, Christian. Then I am looking for photos with our second, a daughter, Sydnee. I am having a difficult time finding photos of just the four of us and had gone through files and files of pictures looking for the perfect photo to represent our family. When all of the sudden I come across a picture of my husband and I and our two children inside a hotel garden. I never really liked the picture and had probably passed over it a thousand times. But at this moment my breath is suddenly taken away from me, I just stare at the photo, and cannot take my eyes from it. Within the background, there is a beautiful gazebo with flowers in full bloom surrounding us. Then you see it, a statue of a fairy, that is quietly sitting just to the side of our little family. At the time of the photo, we had just our two children, but now in the present, we have a third child, Ella, a precious daughter. Her name means: beautiful and fairylike. Ella was in that photo so many years ago, before she was even a thought in our minds or hearts. Our little fairy waiting quietly for the chance to join our family.
This is why I love to scrapbook. These moments when connections are made and you are brought back to the present through the amazement of the past. When your ordinary existence is turned into an extraordinary abundance, and you look at every moment as something you want to, or just need to cherish. Those moments include: my daughter’s long-distance phone call to her grandma, a stack of books that I want to read in the near future, or a special smile that I notice on my son when he has overcome an undeniable fear. I want to document each of these experiences down to the last sigh. I need to savor these moments and understand that each of them will never come again. This is how scrapbook design has affected my life. I want to tell stories from photo that will never come again, yet will be remembered.