The Household COO

Well, okay, so it’s been in for a while now.

I have to admit, when I first saw the shop Papier in The Curve, I didn’t think this hobby would survive here -especially not when it cost so much just to get the materials. Imagine my surprise when I noticed more scrapbooking shops popping up all over the place, while shops that didn’t normally offer scrapbooking products started supplying them. I guess the whole scrapbooking thing has really taken off…

This is the first scrapbook I ever made after our honeymoon as a gift for some friends in Japan:

Somewhere around the middle of the album, I was starting to lose my enthusiasm for scrapbooking. By the time I got to the end of the album, I pretty much got over the need to express myself artistically.

Recently, after much nagging, I finally developed more photos of Gavin and decided to make another scrapbook of Gavin’s baby photos. I ended up developing so many photos that I had enough photos for three large albums.

Since I had so many photos, I adopted a rather minimalistic approach to decorating my pages. Firstly, I crammed too many photos onto one page.

Secondly, I used very little decorations for each page.

Forgive me for sounding cheap and miserly when we’re talking about happy memories, but when you consider that these sticker letterings cost me RM15,

and these stickers cost anywhere from RM15-25, and add the fact that I have 180 pages to decorate, it is starting to get a little out of hand, don’t you think?

The up side of taking the minimalistic approach was that I completed one album a lot more quickly than it took me to finish the album I made after our honeymoon.

Only in Malaysia does a hobby like this cost so much. I remember being able to buy art and craft supplies from Spotlight in Melbourne for such reasonable prices that it didn’t seem so outrageous to keep such hobbies.

That said, there is a trick to scrapbooking in Malaysia at a more affordable price. Instead of using the stickers and all those fancy supplies, you can buy the decorative cards that they have available for the backdrop and cut out the pictures for decorations. Instead of costing some RM15-25 for 10 to 20 stickers, you can get a whole lot more pictures for RM5-15.

If you really want to go cheaper, just use some cutesy wrapping paper which will give you a heck of a lot more pictures for RM1.50-2.00. I don’t think you can get cheaper than that.

Now I can go back and add some more colour to the first album I made…

That said, though, I have to admit my efforts at scrapbooking are rather lame when you compare them to stuff like this.

I love looking at Gavin’s old pictures.  It’s sometimes hard to imagine how little he used to be and how quickly time flies when you’re having fun.

The philosophy behind the Secret is that if we think only about the things that we desire, then those desires become a reality.  Unfortunately, if negative things fill our thoughts, those things also become a reality.  So how do we control our thoughts when we have so many thoughts running through our heads at any given moment of the day? 

Since it is impossible to monitor every thought that goes through our heads, the better way is to control our feelings and emotions.  By making sure that our feelings and emotions are happy, then our thoughts remain positive.  Through our positive thoughts, we attract the good things we want in our lives.

Therefore the task is to think of things that make us happy.  Well, a great source of joy is my son and the memories of past holidays I have had with the hubby even before we were married.  Since I have one external hard disk full of photos I have collected over the years and it seems a waste for those pictures to fade into an archive of data, I’ve decided I’m going to start posting the photos that make me smile - starting with this one: