I am O.C. I make no apologies about that.
On the other hand, I can also be very sentimental.
Quite a conundrum, don't you think?
The test on which side of my personality would prevail finally came on the day I had to pack our stuff to move to a new home. I was tasked to take out sizable items from our garage depot. And although I could have easily chosen to transport them to our new house since they are organized into clear plastic bins, I decided that I have two choices, either donate usable things to charity or discard as much as I can. If they have been in storage for quite sometime, then they won't be missed.
However, in the middle of my sorting, I found out that four of the containers housed memorabilia of my daughter's school work, from preschool to fifth grade. I had kept most, if not all, of her art work, homework, book reports, and science fair projects. They were, to say the least, a capacious lot.
The O.C. part of me tempted me to just close my eyes and empty the bins into our recycling can. But the sentimental side, the one who insisted to keep them all in the first place, kept playing the 'guilt' card, "if you throw them away you will never ever see them again." Oh my! What was I going to do?
Fortunately we are in a digital age, where things can either be scanned or photographed. Although it is not the same as feeling as touching the actual item, digitizing these things makes for a good compromise. I can stick to my hard rules of clearing up the clutter, and still keep my kid's school memories.
To make sure they do not stay littered in my computer's hard drive, I decided to compile them all into a hard bound book! Because this project is enormous and extremely important, there is no other book publisher I would use other than Blurb.com. They have made it extremely easy for anyone to create a beautifully crafted book. Their intuitive Booksmart software has a multitude number of creative templates and fonts. Though I am a book designer, I encourage everyone to try creating their own book. Hire me for the complicated ones (for which I can use Adobe Indesign)!
So if you happen to be an O.C. and sentimal, it turns out you do not have to choose which one dominates in the face of scrambled mementos! Just grab your digital camera, take some pictures, and design them all into a book! I certainly did, and the result is a 360 page keepsake, aptly titled, "First to Fifth: The Elementary School Years of Ashley Victoria".
Here is a preview:
It's interesting that once you start the process it
also takes you into a heartwarming trip down memory lane of your kid's school years! 
As someone who is constantly trying to simplify and de-clutter, I love this!