I have a friend that lives a pretty stressful life. She runs a business and a family and is involved in a couple charities. Her kids are involved in several extra curricular activities that take time and of course, her church requires her time as well.

At night after the rest of the family was in bed and sleeping she found herself sitting on the couch and staring into space. Her health was falling apart; she wasn’t sleeping well and was finding little joy in life. Staring into space did little to relieve the stress so she started to read. That helped at times, but more often than not, she couldn’t get her mind to stop long enough to get into the story at hand.

That’s when she started going through the old boxes of her children’s pictures allowing her mind to wonder back to the many wonderful times their family had shared. She noticed the photos were being worn and beat up piled all together and some were even water damaged and stuck together from sitting on the cement floor of the basement.

One night she remembered an old scrapbook album in a drawer that I had given her when she was in the hospital. I told her at the time she might like to use it to keep a record of her family. To tell you the truth she had never been the arts and crafts type and after she was well, she put the album away and forgot about it.

So, here she was at midnight with a pile of colored card stock, scrapbook paper , adhesive, page protectors and the scrapbook album. She really wasn’t sure what she was doing, after all, she had never gone to any formal scrapbooking classes or hung out with the rest of us when we scrapbooked. But she figured why not give it a shot. Well, that was when she caught the fever and has never looked back.

She is still not the arts and crafts kind of gal and wouldn’t call her scrapbooks artwork like so many scrapbook enthusiasts, but she does savor her hour before bed relaxing and compiling her simple books. My friend has finally found a way to unwind and de-stress her life.