We’ve been back for just about two months now. We’ve gotten back into our old lives, we’ve gotten all the packages we’d shipped, although people will continue to receive our postcards for another couple of months (seriously, international mail?).

While on the ship, we put all our shore excursion tickets, maps, attraction flyers, etc., into a drawer, and I shoved them all into a bag and packed them. Now I’m looking at a large shopping bag full of paper of various descriptions, as well as a large scrapbook album and a ton of stickers and other scrapbooking paraphernalia.

What I don’t have is time.

Once we got back from our trip, there was the mountain of work that had to be caught up on, which took almost a month all by itself. Then there were the endless “tell me all about your trip” conversations that we’re still having with people. I want to bark at all of them “just look at my blog!” Honestly, I have no idea what people want to hear. The blog has way more info about the trip than I currently have in my memory, so I don’t know what they want to hear that isn’t in the blog. But whatever.

So now, I’m working on saving my own memories of the trip, but at this remove, it gets harder. I honestly don’t remember the order we visited countries in (was Vietnam before or after Malaysia?), or exactly how many cities we visited in different countries. It’s the reason I started the blog in the first place – I wanted to put down those memories when they were still fresh.

Now I want to create some kind of narrative of my trip using these artifacts, and the more time goes by, the more I wonder why I’m doing it and who I’m doing it for. That’s always been a question in my mind when it came to scrapbooks. If I’m going to go through all the hassle of sifting through this stuff and sticking it in a book, I want it to be for a reason.

We found out when we got back that our oldest daughter is expecting a baby girl in October. Now that I think about it, I guess I’m doing it for her, even before I knew she existed. “Here’s the cool places your ancestor went back in the days when she lived (for a very short time) on the last ocean liner in the world.”