Tips & Tricks: Tell Me About It

We probably all know the saying that a picture is worth 1000 words, but I'm not entirely convinced. As a scrapper I appreciate a good photo more than most, but when I look back at photos from my pre-scrapping days I'm always surprised at how much I can't remember about them. (I'll admit to having a horrible memory, but I'd like to put the blame squarely where it belongs-on my kids! How am I supposed to remember details from 10 years ago when I'm busy keeping track of who ate what when, where every toy was last seen, and whose turn it is to pick the book or video? Oh, wait...I was in the middle of making a point, wasn't I?)

When I look through my albums, I spend at least as much time rereading the journaling as I do looking at the pictures. Without my journaling there's so much I'd have forgotten, like what my oldest son used to call himself, how the boys reacted to the news that they were going to have a sister, and what everyone's favorites were at each age. Maybe it's because I'm not as strong a photographer as I'd like to be, but I often capture my children's personalities more completely through my words than my pictures.

I know a lot of scrappers struggle with journaling, so I wanted to share a tip and a website that I rely on.

First the tip. When I upload pictures from my camera to the computer, I take a few minutes to write some notes in a word processing document and store them with the photos. I might include a quote from one of the kids, some thoughts about what I felt while I watched them interact, rules to a game they made up, or a list of milestones the baby accomplished that month. If you already share that info online, refer back to your blog, FB wall, or wherever. You can copy and paste your posts into a document and save it if you want to keep everything together. It may be a year before I get around to scrapping those photos, but with notes to draw from I'll still be able to write meaningful journaling.

Now on to the site. I include lots of details about daily life in my scrapbooks, but I need inspiration to go beyond the moment. For that I love the website Friday letters (also known as Baby Love Letters). Each week there's a prompt and a story about what inspired it. To give you an idea of how varied the promts are, here are a few from my "to scrap" list:

#129 How are you teaching your child to handle stress?
#71 What is something you would like your child to know about their grandparents?
#130 What was your world like when you were little?

Here's a LO inspired by #112 What are your child's favorite things? (Credits here.)



I used Lyndsay's Berry Delightful Kit and Alphas for it.




I hope you make (and journal about!) lots of happy memories this summer.