What a fantastic idea!
I immediately opened an email account for my daughter. Getting her an email account was on my to-do list anyway. I hadn’t done it yet because I wasn’t really sure what I would do with it besides secure her name attached to a gmail account.
Enter the Google Chrome advertisement.
This simplifies scrapbooking for my daughter. (Minimalist scrapbooking, anyone?)
Right now, I do make scrapbooks for my daughter and for the family. What tends to happen is that I end up taking a million photos, printing half of those, and not wanting multiple pages of the same thing in the family albums. I’ll make one or two layouts for the family album and end up with one layout for my daughter’s album. I know I can’t keep this up, nor do I want to keep this up. I don’t want my daughter going off to college with 18 scrapbooks, one for each year of her life. I also don’t want to make separate digital scrapbook pages for her in addition to the family layouts.
Now, the idea of setting up an email account for and periodically emailing her photos, video, and memories is brilliant. I could even forward her news items (such as Osama bin laden’s death or the earthquake/tsunami in Japan). Then at some point in time, I’ll give her the password and she can look through these emails. If she wants to download the photos and make her own scrapbook with them, then great. If not, that’s ok, too. Either way, going off to college with an inbox full of stories is a lot more portable than a bunch of physical scrapbooks. Don’t get me wrong, I am going to continue to scrapbook whatever stories I want, but now, I will email stories to my daughter and give up the extra scrapbook. Of course, I will probably keep a scaled down version of a scrapbook for her….more along the lines of a school memories book for school photos, report cards, and other items along those lines. I think I’m rambling now, but you hopefully get the idea.
What do you think about doing a “Dear Sophie” style scrapbook for your own children?
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
