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"  I had to make a choice: Create sentences or crop photos. When I looked at the crooked pictures in my scrapbooks, the victims of my lacking craftiness, the choice was clear. So, shortly before I started blogging, I ditched scrapbooking. Yet now and then, it makes me feel a twinge of guilt. My 2001 scrapbook ends abruptly after Christmas that year. There&amp;#039;s a hastily cropped photo of my son, then 3, grinning and holding up a toy car that I don&amp;#039;t remember, followed by a blank white page. And that&amp;#039;s it. No Christmas dinner. No New Year&amp;#039;s Eve. No 2002, 2003, 2004....You get the idea. Meanwhile, my mother has scrapbooked practically every waking moment of the entire decade. She even made us our very own scrapbook for our Disney World trip - and she wasn&amp;#039;t even there. No doubt she&amp;#039;s already plastered down photos of our Easter gathering from this past weekend, and festooned them with stickers that look like colored eggs and paper cut-outs of rabbits. I have done nothing of the sort. I didn&amp;#039;t even put out Easter decorations this year, largely because it hadn&amp;#039;t occurred to me to do so until Friday, when I overheard two moms among the holiday crowds at the supermarket talking about their decorations: &amp;quot;Oh, it&amp;#039;s not too late to put them out,&amp;quot; one mom assured the other. Oh yes it is, I thought. Besides, if I&amp;#039;d bothered to dig them out of the attic on Good Friday, no doubt they&amp;#039;d stay up until Fourth of July. After all, I left my Christmas wreath up until well into March. Oh, bah humbug. I was lamenting my apparent inability to keep up with chronicling and celebrating the holidays, the milestones and the years gone by when I spotted a little reassurance that perhaps I&amp;#039;m not alone. While my neighbors were away for spring break last week, I was taking care of their pets in their impossibly neat home. I mean, really: How can they keep up a house with two kids, a cat, a guinea pig and fish that have been known to jump out of the tank with the teeny tiny sponge by their kitchen sink? Anyhow, I was heading down their hallway to fill up the cat&amp;#039;s bowl with water when I saw three small wooden deer near the couch. Wait a minute, I thought. That one&amp;#039;s got a red nose. It was true: There in the dust- and clutter-free living room, were Christmas decorations! In April! Yes! Yes, I am not the only one in the neighborhood who can&amp;#039;t keep up with it all! Yes, I&amp;#039;m not the only one who&amp;#039;s seasonally challenged! Yes, I am, no doubt, not the only one who ditched scrapbooking nearly a decade ago! When I got home, I received an e-mail from the father of a girl who&amp;#039;s in the church choir with my son. He was forwarding an e-mail from the choir director, who&amp;#039;d lost my e-mail address, that said that choir practice was cancelled for the next two weeks. &amp;quot;Thanks,&amp;quot; I wrote back. &amp;quot;I hate to say it, but with baseball and soccer starting this week, the idea of not having choir practice, well, can I get an Amen?&amp;quot; And then I apologized for never sending him the video of our kids singing at Christmas mass like I&amp;#039;d promised months ago. He replied, &amp;quot;AMEN. No problem with the video. We, much like yourself, can&amp;#039;t see time available to actually watch it until July anyway.&amp;quot; Ah, yes. Just in time to take down the Easter decorations. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a22140/hope-for-seasonally-challenged/?src=shelter_footer>