Scrapping Across the Miles
By:Heather M.
I have loved scrapbooking ever since I was first introduced to the concept at a Scrap party hosted by a neighbor. Up until that point, my photos were all stuck inside those hideously acidic peel & stick magnetic photo albums. I was a fairly new Mom at the time and jumped on the scrapbookig bandwagon with both feet.
I live very far away from my relatives and my husband's relatives. We move a lot - our average is once a year. Scrapbooking provides a unique way for me to preserve those precious memories of each home, each apartment, each neighborhood, each church, each school, etc. Perhaps because we move so often, I tend to take a lot more pictures of our daily activities - things like photos of my daughter's school building and the market down the street would normally, I think, get overlooked and only "special days" would get snapped.
However, I really want my daughter to be able to look back on her life and see all the wonderful places we've lived and revisit with all those former friends, neighbors, and family members she has only ever known briefly. It is a way of capturing her childhood and "where she grew up" in a way that is more permanent and tangible than anything else could be. A video can't capture the handwriting of a 5 year old or the crumbled ticket from a football game. Thankgoodness for scrapbooking!
Each year, I try to assemble mini scrapbooks capturing the events and everyday happenings of that year. I send some of these mini albums out to our relatives who live so far away so they too can enjoy each year of our lives. For our family, this is the best way for us to share our lives with them. Sure we keep in touch over the phone, but nothing tells the story the way a photo does.
How can one otherwise describe how cute a little girl looks the first time she tastes a snowflake on her tongue? Or the uniqueness of living in a foreign country? Before scrapbooking, I used to send a handful of photos in an envelope, which my relatives may have stuck in a drawer or in their fridge, to be replaced next time an envelope of new photos came in the mail. Now, with a mini-scrapbook, they can have all of those memories in one safe place, thiers to revisit time and time again over the years.
Tomorrow at dMarie Daily: I'm living in a box, but my scrapbooks look good!, by Elizabeth S.
