To Scrap or to Click

I made it over to scrapbooking night at the church at about 8:30pm. I spent an lovely hour there chatting and scrapping, and completed two whole pages. Then I packed up my "luggage" and rolled my scrapbooking stuff back to the car. After contemplating the productiveness of the evening and asking myself these questions--

"Is it really worth dragging all this scrapbooking stuff out so I can do two pages?"
and
"Isn't that the reason why I'm so behind on scrapbooking - because by the time I get everything out, its time to put it all away?"

--I seriously contemplated going digital. It feels almost mutinous. I love to thumb through the acid/lignin free papers, smell them, feel their texture. I love to shop for stickers, die cuts, brads, eyelets, ribbons . . . I love to manipulate the paper goods with my hands: snipping, punching, ripping, cropping. I love the feel of a finished scrapbook page, heavy with layers of cardstock matting and preserved in it's plastic,, glare-free, archival safe page protector. And someday, someday, I will let the children touch the precious scrapbook materials and make some creations of their own.

But lets get real: I am doing seven scrapbooks (one for each of the kids and a family album). In my "spare" time. So, perhaps if I went digital I could get things done a little faster and the supplies wouldn't take up so much space. In case of fire or flood I could grab a few cds instead of a hope chest full of binders (after I grab the kids, of course). And it would solve the dilemma I will no doubt face in about ten years: Do I actually let my kids take their scrapbooks when they leave home? It would be quite a bit easier to just give them each a disk full of my, ahem, their precious memories, and keep a copy for myself.

Such a dilemma. Perhaps I will seriously consider doing digital scrapbooking after I use up my current stash of scrapbook supplies. After hours of carefully selecting and calculated splurging, I can't just let them go to waste. I'll switch over then, it will probably be about the end of the millennium. Oh, and when I get a digital camera too.