Make a Scrapbook

Small details best characterize our lives, but they are the first to slip away. Time has been whizzing by in these early hectic days with my three-year-old Jack and his baby brother, Nick, and I find myself hoping that my memory will miraculously double in capacity. Journals, videos and photo albums get squeezed out by the necessities of our lives--laundry, meals, getting to work on time. But last summer, it was in this daily round of activities that I finally discovered a solution to my sentimental yearnings. In the half hour or so before Jack's bedtime, when we would normally be drawing pictures together, I realized we could carve out time to work on a family scrapbook.

Our Summer Scrapbook was a joint project with a manageable, built-in deadline: Labor Day. Jack picked out the colors and pictures for each page, I arranged the pages and wrote captions, and he glued everything that needed gluing (and many things that didn't). Our book is full of photos, drawings, stories, stickers, lists, postcards and household notes, all organized by themes (Papa's Favorite Things, for example, or Our Pets). It captures little comic things, like Nicky's penchant for hiding toys in his brother's potty, and big scary things, like Nicky's bout with pneumonia. It records the progress of our garden, Jack's favorite restaurant ("Ponderosis!") and his evening ritual at the window.

Oddly, scrapbooks, a throwback to past generations, have become a booming business for the craft industry. No longer a simple matter of paper and rubber cement, today's formal scrapbooks call for "acid-free" papers (which won't yellow and degrade with age), mats and patterned backgrounds, all for sale on shelf after shelf at your local craft megastore. Manufacturers theorize that this craze is a backlash against our high-tech times, but the activity is anything but low-key. Crafters meticulously crop and mount photographs, spending as much as an hour laying out a single page.

Our scrapbook took advantage of some of the fun supplies, but it is truly a humble work of art. It took 15 minutes a page to lay out and holds some materials containing acid, from drawings on place mats to postcards from friends. It may not last forever, but then again, it also didn't take forever to make.

If your family decides to start a scrapbook, you'll undoubtedly discover the methods and materials that best suit your schedule and kids' ages. To give you a place to start, though, Jack and I are passing along some of the tips and techniques that worked well for us.

I am already planning a small Christmas Scrapbook, and after that, a My Alphabet Scrapbook as Jack learns his ABCs. Meantime, Our Summer Scrapbook is a testament to our everyday lives, shaping forever how the boys will remember these days. On a cold night, as I turn back its pages, Jack already sees the summer as a long time ago, when he was a little boy.

Alexandra Kennedy is Editorial Director ofFAMILYFUN.