Scrapbooking Birthdays

Welcome to the Write. Click. Scrapbook birthday blog hop!

Since we're celebrating our fourth birthday, I'm focusing my three tips on scrapbooking birthdays...which is sort of funny on my part, as I'm sort of the worst mom ever when it comes to doing birthday parties for my kids. I stand in admiration (and a little bit of envy!) of those moms who manage elaborate kid parties; mine tend to be...well, the opposite of elaborate!

But we do always celebrate birthdays with gifts and a family dinner at least, so with four kids I do a lot of birthday scrapbook layouts. Here are some of the ways I make sure to make the layouts memorable.

Write.
Yesterday, my son Kaleb, who's turning eight next week, said "Dad, will you bring me home a new mini i-Pad for my birthday? From your work?" Ha! (My husband Kendell manages testing, so sometimes he'll bring home some hardware to make sure the software is working correctly.)  To me, those little tidbits are the things that bring your journaling to life, but they're also the things that are easy to forget. Here's the secret to not losing the funny little things that are said or happen around birthdays: write them down! In the evening after nearly every birthday party, you'll find me writing down all the details. That way, if I don't get around to scrapbooking about the celebration for awhile, I'll still have the stories down.

Click.
The birthday cake. The birthday kid with each of his or her grandparents. One of the birthday kid with me. The gifts, the dinner table, the decorations. Those are the pictures I take every single year. Of course, I take others, but I've gotten in the habit of taking those shots without fail. If something happened and those were the ONLY shots I got, the story would still be told fairly well. Establish your own birthday-photo traditions and you'll find that since it's tradition, it becomes impossible to forget.

Scrapbook.
On most of my birthday layouts, I include some little tidbit about what is happening in the world on that date. Sometimes it's unusual weather, a movie release, an important news story: just a small FYI that adds a level of interest that has become so fun to look back on as my kids have gotten older.

Now you're on to Christa's blog! Happy birthday scrapbooking to you!