A Different Approach

Yesterday I scrapped a page about Bebo's hair - it was more of a rant than anything. When we displayed the new coif, everybody seemed to feel the need to lecture us on how it looked soooooooo much better short, and how little boys needed to have little boy haircuts, and blah blah blah blah blah.

Hello! It's my kid, and I'll do what I want with his hair! And no, he does not look like a girl - that's ridiculous. We'd decided before he was even born that we weren't going to restrict him to our idea of fashion. As long as he's clean and modest, and we don't really care what he wears. We firmly believe kids will tell you a lot about themselves through their clothing and hair, and the last thing we want to do is stifle that expression and wind up missing something important.

But that's not the real point here. When I presented the page to Jeff, he was surprised.

"I thought scrapbooking was about happy stuff," he informed me, with a puzzled look.

After explaining that scrapping was about life - way more than birthday parties and Halloween costumes - I realized that I'd been remiss in telling the whole story. If he thought that the happy stuff was all I scrapped, then I was seriously off-base in my approach. It's not that I want to scrap a picture of gloom and doom, because that isn't life, either. Instead, I want to tell the little stories as well. When someone picks up my scrapbooks fifty years from now, they should have a complete picture of our lives - the ups and downs, the laughter and the tears, the special and the mundane.

That's what scrapping's really all about, anyway.

Life.


And for your viewing pleasure, here's the layout in question (please ignore the crappy scan - it's hard to get a 12x12 layout to look right on a 8.5x11 scanner):