Books Full Of Memories
October 18th, 2008. Filed under: Sewing on Saturday, This & That.Today we have a guest article by another of my flybaby family members, TW of NJ. T has recently begun to share her creativity with our group. We have one day a week when we send out double dog dares to encourage each other as we bless our homes. This week she conjured up a charming way to enjoy our day based on a Harry Potter theme. In this article T shares her love of creating scrapbooks and the memories they hold.
It is a Sunday afternoon in Autumn. The breeze gently moves the curtains as the aroma of chicken roasting in the oven wafts through the house. I gather my scrapbook supplies and pictures to make a scrapbook. Scrapbooking is more than creating a page with pictures. For me it is memories. When making a scrapbook I usually have a theme. Any topic can lead to a book. I have been collecting old family wedding pictures, recently finished my daughter’s college scrapbook and am currently gathering material to do my son’s college years. I have a secret agenda for doing these scrapbooks – the children have to provide some of the material. For instance, sending a child off to college guarantees mom and dad are no longer going to be involved in their world on a daily basis. I grab my camera anytime we visit the college campus or go anywhere, for that matter. I constantly bug my kids to send me pictures of activities they experience while away. When making the scrapbook pages I arrange the photos and then of course the embellishments and text must be added. That is when I engage my children for their help. I get them involved by asking what were the highlights of the page for them, I encourage the captions to be their words rather than my thoughts. This has helped me to glimpse things through their eyes, especially their college experiences.
My daughter enjoys doing these books with me and more times than not if she sees me working on a book she will join in as she did when I created identical mini scrapbooks for each child of a whirlwind trip to Disneyland, California in January. I did not think my son was as interested in the creative process, but he proved me wrong while in Disneyland. I found out that my scrapbook obsession is as important to my kids as it is to me. We were outside of California Adventure where the word California is spelled out in bigger than life sized letters. My son suggested that they climb on the letters for a photo shoot so that we could use those pictures as a title page in our scrapbook. He did not have to ask if there would be a book. He knew it would happen. We spent a fun afternoon with the kids posing on the letters, clowning around, taking pictures and enjoying each other – making memories. So as I said, scrapbooking is memories. The making of the memories and reviewing the memories. It is fun to see the pictures of long lost relatives, but mostly it is fun to live in the moment with the bonus of knowing we will share the good times again every time we pick up one of “Mom’s” scrapbooks.
October 19th, 2008 at 21:40
I enjoyed reading this, and it connected up quite well!