Your Baby Will Die...

By:Rylin R.

I started scapbooking 19 months ago as a way to record every precious memory of what we were told would be our newborn son's short life. Matthew stopped breathing and his heart stopped beating when he was just 24 hours old. He was revived and the doctors were unclear as to the cause. And it would happed again and again.

The next few months turned into a complex web of trips to experts and stays in hospitals. There were many times when we weren't given much hope. My mother in law brought me a scrapbook and all the basic tools and I begin to recoord the story of Mattthew's life. It was something that I could do when their seemed to be little I could do to help my son. We never left Matthew's side so the scrapbbok and tools would often follow us to the hospital where in the middle of the night I found confort int the smiling pictures of my son ( he had an amazing spirit right from the start and smiled even at the doctors and nurses that inflicted so much pain).

The proccess of making the scrapbook and the chance to look back over the pages did more for me than I'll ever be able to put into words. How does this this story and that scrapbook end? I finished it with the pictures from Matthew's first birthday, he was all smiles as he tore open his packages. Matthew is alive and thriving he continues to have special medical needs and will most likley have his 8th operation some time this month but, he looks and acts like a perfect healthy child. I'm now adiicted to scarpbooking and never tire of looking at that first album

Tomorrow at dMarie Daily: why I love scrapbooking, by by dd in CA