Monday Memories - Preserves

If someone would have told me that my husband would become a scrapbooker some day, I'd have said, "No gonna happen.  No sir, not gonna happen."  And, I'd have been dead wrong.

Calvin made himself a recipe book, using the paper cutter and adhesives.  He didn't want any pointers, so I stopped short of offering him my stash of embellishments and washi tape.  His recipe book has one section -- meats -- and as he carefully compiled it he said to himself, "Someday my kids are gonna fight for this book."  I chuckled and reminded him Xerox has kept hundreds of families out of brawls.  

Recently Grace and I finished Abe's book.  

A few weeks before that I finished Ty's book.  

I am now caught-up on our children's scrapbooks.  I never thought I'd see this day.  When our family was growing, we couldn't afford a nice camera.  I used a little 110, but didn't take many pictures because it was expensive to buy the film and back then you developed each picture on the roll --the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Years later we got a digital camera, but it was poor quality and many pictures were grainy.  Even though I kept journals so the kids would at least have word memories, journals are not as fun and colorful as photo memories.  Several years ago, I told Deb Keeley my lack-of-pictures problem and she gave me an idea of how to capture each child's childhood using fewer pictures.  She suggested an A-Z book with each letter of the alphabet describing a quality of the child with a picture or two illustrating it. For example, the letter "P" in Ty's book is "Persistent." On that page there are three pictures:  Ty learning to ride a bike, learning to roller blade, and wrestling. The journal entry gives details about that part of Ty's personality or stories that illustrate it.  Even though the pictures are taken years apart on the page, they effectively capture the memory that Ty doesn't quit; and in the end, that entry tells a lot more about Ty than if I'd have had a picture of him every Christmas in front of the tree with a new toy.   

The A-Z books were fun to do, but a weight feels lifted now that they're done.  I also did mission and Academy books for Abe and Ty, but Cali and Ande were scrapbooking their own lives by then so I didn't do any post-high school books for them.  

Now it's on to scrapbooking family memories and putting pictures with Calvin's personal history.  I love this kind of stuff.