I’m usually proud of my kids, but sometimes I’m extra proud. Tonight my eighth-grade daughter put on a nice dress and pretty shoes (oh my gosh!) and walked across a stage to accept her Gold-N award for high grades throughout her middle school career. Yes, her daddy and I were proud, but most striking to me was seeing my child suddenly looking like a beautiful young lady ready for high school. Yikes! All the parents were snapping photos to document the moments of their own pride, and probably, like us, their astonishment at seeing how good their kid cleaned up.
What will you do with your special photos? Scrapbooking memoirist, Bettyann Schmidt, posts her ideas of saving pieces of life, not just photos, on the Women’s Memoirs website. Instead of making a sterile, wordless photo album or even scrapbooking with brief explanatory notes, she writes a little story besides the photos for a short, written remembrance of who is in the photo, or what happened and how she felt about it. I want to do this, especially for my kids. Read one of my favorite Bettyann scrapmoir posts and download her new, free Scrapmoir writing book at the Women’s Memoirs website. No, you don’t have to be a woman to do this; sensitive, thoughtful dads can make a scrapmoir, too – a simpler, manly version.
Look at her!
Skinny legs now shapely
Beneath a flowery frock
Showing off a figure
That looks brand new to me.
She tosses back long bangs
To look me in the eye
And I see the child’s face
Fading into the past,
An old photo in a new album.
moonbridgebooks 