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You CAN Scrapbook Baby's First Year

I wanted to start with a quote that I think really sums up the whole purpose for us being here today and talking about scrapbooking, your baby's first year, and it comes from a very wise bear named winnie the pooh. You might have heard of him, and he says this, sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart, and I just love that quote, I feel like it perfectly sums up what's what it feels like when you have a baby, because this tiny bundle of joy comes into your life and within seconds of meeting him or her, you are just filled with love for this little person and your heart, just full there's. The quote describes it perfectly um, there's also something also that happens when you have a baby and I don't know if anyone else has experiences, but having a baby kind of changes your whole perspective on how fast time is going by suddenly, when you're a parent, you can see time changing day by day. Your baby's a little bit bigger every day, he's reaching new milestones eve...

ry week, and suddenly it becomes clear that my goodness he's not going to be a baby forever, and we want to slow the clock down and pause time a bit and really be able to savor these moments. Scrapbooking is not a magic way to stop the clock. Unfortunately, he can scrapbook your baby's first year it's not going to freeze time for you, but the wonderful thing about it is that it does give us a way to document and record our memories so that once baby's grown up, we still have something to go back teo and enjoy those memories and those moments that matter the most with him during that first year. Um, so I wanted to tell you a little bit about my story, okay? I'll tell you a little bit about my story and scrapbooking because I think I want to encourage everyone whether you're a brand new mom or you're a mother of kids for a little bit older, that this project is one that's worthwhile for everyone. You know everyone can do this project. Every parent can complete a scrapbook, a baby's first year, you don't have to have a newborn it I want to do that so a little bit about me, a cz jaco said, I'm the mother of four I have eleven year old twin boys, a nine year old daughter, and then my youngest is she just turned five last week, so they're kind of spread out there and I started scrapbooking. A few years before my first children were born. So what that meant is that when I had babies, I was really ready and gung ho to get in there and start documenting their first year. I was really intentional about jotting things down, keeping track of what they were doing, writing down what they waited each doctor's visit and just keeping a lot of notes that when I did finally have time, tio, sit down and scrapbook. I had a lot of information. There are a lot of details. So some of you, I know our new moms here are about to have a baby, and so you can choose to be really intentional the same way that I was in keeping track of milestones and moments and memories and just really have a lot of details in your book. Um, so by the end of the first year with my twins and with my daughter, I found that I did a pretty complete scrapbook of their first year, and it was great. Now in my my fourth child came along, things were a little bit different in our household because I now had first grade twins who were in soccer and school and, um you know, just busy with homework and everything else, my daughter was in preschool, so I was taking her back and forth, and so our lives were just kind of hectic and busy, and so I had a little bit left time to scrap book, and at this point I was also designing for some scrapbooking manufacturers, which was wonderful, but that meant when I did have scrapbooking time, I was doing assignments for them. Sometimes I could work in my baby pictures and do my baby album that way, but sometimes it just didn't work out with the assignment, so I thought I was doing a pretty good job of putting together the scrapbook, but when I was preparing for this class, I kind of started to look at his book, and I really thought I had a lot of gaps in there, a lot of stories that I didn't tell a lot of information that I left out. So now I'm kind of face with this problem of having to go back five years and sort of fill in some of that. So there might be some of us in the summer you in the room and watching that are in the same situation where your baby might be five like minus. Or you might be ten who he might be going off to college even and you're feeling a little bit nostalgic now and you want to go back and start scrapbooking some of those baby pictures and if that's the case then that's awesome to you, you're still in a great position to do that because you might not have the details that the brand new mom with the baby at home would have unless you were smart enough to write those down at the time but what you lack in details, I think you're going to make up for in perspective, you know what your child is like now and you can kind of tie that into what they were like as a baby, you're sort of combining the president the path and that's anything to d'oh and also the stories that you're going to document are going to be ones that are naturally very meaningful to you and your family because they stuck with you all these years. All right, so like I said, this project is for everybody knew mom's not so new moms, we can all do this project, so why is it important to scrap book your baby's first year? And this is really some of these items that I have on this list could be for any scrap book doesn't have to be just a baby scrapbook, but any scrapbook in general the first reason and I think that season bombs among us can agree to this you think you'll remember everything because in the moment it's so sweet to you and so precious and you think I'll never forget this moment but you you do end up forgetting a lot of them because you're just really busy a lot happens during that first year there's a lot of milestones that air reached and you just can't remember you're also really sleep deprived which is not help with your long term memory so you think you'll remember but she probably won't remember everything on the next one is that photos are meant to be showcased and enjoyed and with the age of digital photography now means we take lots of pictures which is wonderful but there's no longer than incentive to take your roll of film drop it off to see what pictures you got because we've seen them on the back of the camera right? What happens and is a lot of those just live on our hard drives live on the camera and they're never printed out and enjoyed and really that's what photos were supposed to do we don't want to forget about them on the computer we want to print them out and scrapbooking really kind of forces us to do that so that we can put them onto the paper all right photos and words are a more complete story so printing out your photos and put them putting them in an album is a great first start but you're going to have a more complete story of baby's first year if you combine that with words if you include some journaling and some storytelling on there so scrapbooking enables us to do that children love to learn about themselves and what many of you have kids and you are a scrap of her already you probably have seen that your kids really do you love to look through their books I know mind still do they pull, pull them off the shelves and look through them and it's a fun way for them just to feel really connected to their family and to learn about their history and you know kids are always asking to tell tell me what I was like when I was a baby or what? What funny things that I used to d'oh so that's a fun thing that you do when you put together a scrap up on scrapbooking remind you of what matters most and this is something that I don't think I realized when I first heard it scrapbooking think I was more interested in just you know, getting my photos on the pretty papers and playing with the product and jotting down a couple words but as I've gone through the years and scrapping for a while now I found that for me the time for me to kind of stop pause, meditate a little bit about what really matters most because life as a mom it's, not always glamorous it's not always full of fun things there's a lot of hard jobs that are in there, and sometimes you get bogged down by that scrapbooking for me, as a time when I can kind of just stop, tune that all out, look at these pictures of my children and record the happy memories that we've had together in our family times and so it's a good reminder of how many blessings we have. And then finally it's a creative outlet, you know, for people who like to be creative and like to feel crafty it's a fun way to kind of feed that desire, but it's also productive because you're getting, you know you're you're letting yourself feel creative, but you're also producing this wonderful gift for your family that will be enjoyed for years to come. So that all sounds good? Yes, all right, so it sounds great, but and I put this slide on here not to be kind of a downer to talk about all the great reasons a scrapbook and then throw this up here, but I found that talking to mom through the years I've been in lots of moms, clubs and play groups and things like that. When I tell them that I'm a scrapbook er and tell them how many scrapbooks I've made over the years, they all say the same thing. Well, that's, wonderful! Your kids are so lucky, I wish I could do that, and then comes the big but and then there's all these reasons that they left that they just can't get that done, or they were not interested in it. So I know there are simply blocks there that get in people's way, and I would love to hear j k o from the online audience, but I wanted to hear from you all, too, in the studio, what are the stumbling blocks that you've encountered? Either if you're already a scrapbook or things that kind of slow you down, or if you're new to scrap booking, what sort of stands in your way of thinking, I can't do this so anybody wants toe sure, we can go down the line and share, and we do want to start fashir just for me. Time working part time and also having too little woman together under three, three and under. So yeah, time's a big one, is he? Uh, yeah, christina, just finding the time with work because it's not like five or ten minutes, you want to spend that time, and then when you start it's like three hours later and you're like what am I doing? I need to get some sleep so it's really just finding the time right? You usually don't have the time but when I do have the time I do have kids so when they see me take out the fun stuff they want a craft so they're crafting and I set them up and then I come back to mind by that time I'm tired I want to do and I have to cook dinner so then it kind of just gets put on the back burner so that's kind of you know sometimes she's writing my supplies or not I bring this stuff out is fun and all of them want it you know did the same thing that my mom is doing but you know I don't get to focus on and I get one page done to my husband I gave you three hours no u e me them also s so funny that's great all right um I would think that my most come and doubly block is inspiration for the different activities that I do with the different things like doing this baby album has been a huge stumbling block because I haven't I didn't get inspired it all I'm looking through the books and I'm not inspired any more you know it's just like ok then that I've added flowers to this I've been through that technique so that's my inspiration tio keep doing it, you know, a different techniques, different way of doing stuff, maybe a different color palette. But that's, my biggest stumbling block is getting inspired to redo what I've already done before. I'm totally new. So it's all very intimidating. I'm not gonna lie there's just there's so many options and so many things you can do and just so many, so many things. So I get overwhelmed in the night it's it's in the box and I had I don't do it right nightly and struggle with being a perfectionist and things take way longer than they should. And instead of finishing pages and albums, I you know I get stuck because it's not working like I have in my mind. You wanted to look exactly a certain way. I suffer from that as well, so I can relate it's. Interesting. Is everybody on the same in the line is echoing exactly what our ladies have said here in the studio. Oh, come on, I think it's so come macario says time that's the big thing and shall see is saying she likes to be a perfectionist but the project just takes too long on kerry saying, I've been scrapping for a few years and I found that I have lots of ideas, but when it comes to trying to use those ideas, I have teo, I come to a personal creative roadblock on red scorpion was saying they were basically just too many tools lt's, so she finds it just under overwhelming because she goes down the scrap of card so jam packed with fun goodies that that she finds intimidating, right? I can really to all those, and actually you guys have hit on a lot of them that I've heard over the years, the biggest one being, of course, as moms, especially I just don't have time, I mean, our time is so limited and thinking about completing a big project like this, I just don't have time. We're going to talk about some strategies to help you kind of streamline the process a little bit. I can't make time there's only twenty four hours a day, but we can kind of streamline the process a little bit to make it more manageable. Another thing I've heard a lot of my photos are all on the computer on my phone and that's, a big stumbling block for people like we said, people have tons of photos now they're all on their hard drives on their computers in digital format. And it can be intimidating, especially if you're doing this for a child who is several years old now and you have a lot of pictures to print to see even get into that mindset like I'm going to sit down and I'm going to get these things printed so that's another thing we're going to talk about um this is a big one too. I'm not creative and I think everybody is creative in their own way, but this can be a big stumbling block because you can see, you know, if you look at scrapbooking galleries online, some people's pages, air just you know, over the top, you know, completely artistic beautiful and that can be intimidating because you think I can't do that on my pages are going to look like that, so that can be something that just gets in the way of scrapbooking and then finally the last one as we said it's just all overwhelming the paper, the stickers, the embellishments I don't know what to do with it all I just can't even think about it or focus on it. So again, these air kind of the common things that people have trouble with, I don't want to be a downer, but I think if we identify which ones you kind of are the stumbling block for ourselves and we can look to find solutions to work around them and that brings me to the two goals that I kind of have for our day today when I was putting together the course I was coming across, he seemed to themes as I went through the planning stages and they kind of became my two goals of what I wanted to accomplish, and the first one is this I want to show you how to keep this project manageable because I know from experience if it's not manageable it's not going to get done, we don't have a lot of extra time, and we just need this to be manageable both in how we go about the process getting the photos, every bit of it that's, not manageable won't be done so that's the first one, the second one is that I want tio I want to encourage you to make the whole process and your project meaningful. We want to make sure that our pages have meaning because the more meaningful they are to us, the more rewarding it isthe and the more rewarding it isthe, though more will be motivated to make another page and keep going through the process until it's finished and just the process itself. You know it's, like I said, it's, a nice time to take for yourself to kind of think about what you know, how much you've been blessed with in your life, all the good things in your life, so just to enjoy the process and to make it meaningful. So at this point, I just wanted to kind of go through the day a little bit and give you a heads up of where we're headed and what we're going to cover in segment one is kind of our getting organized and getting ready to scrap book, so we're going to talk about, you know, how do you get your photos printed? How do you keep track of these memories? What product do I use? How do I go about that? And then we're actually gonna make a page, so we'll do some scrapbooking, some fun stuff. Um, in segment two, we're going to focus mostly on traditional layouts and ideas. I'll share some tips for streamlining, streamlining the process and hopefully saving you some time in the process, and in doing that, we'll talk about using scrapbooking sketches. Have any of you use sketches before your scrapbooking that can save a lot of time and also teach you how to use a collage on a page? Because that's another time saver, you can get eight photos on one page and you can check those off you're off your list of food it's a scrapbook so that segment to be doing to lay out in that segment. In segment three we're going to kind of shift from the manageable part of the theme to making it meaningful so we'll talk about what exactly should we scrapbook going beyond just the milestones to really what matters most and baby's first year and I'm really excited that we'll get to have a chat with ali edwards she'll be here via skype to talk with us because she's been so inspiring to so many people over the years to really tell their stories and document both the big and the little moments in our lives so she'll be here in segment three then I'll talk about some journaling ideas if you're not a big writer because I'm not personally I don't enjoy the writing process what are some ideas in some ways you can get around that but still make meaningful pages that have a lot of story to them and then we'll do another scrapbook page in segment three ok, so in segment four we're going to shift gears and segment for so all segment one through three are kind of doing just traditional twelve by twelve scrapbooking layouts but in segment we're going to talk about using pocket style scrapbooking or project life to complete baby's first year album because this is a way to keep it more manageable. A lot of people find the twelve by twelve page format to be a little bit overwhelming and so that's you or if anyone home is feeling that way, the pocket style scrapbooking or using the project life products can really help with that. We'll get to have a skype chat with vicki higgins during segment for the super awesome lady who and who put together project life and came out with this great system to help us get our photos. And our stories told, I'll talk about how to get your three by four photos printed, because in those little slots there, those three by force, that can be a stumbling block for people. They want to be able to slide photos and some of those smaller pockets. But they don't really know. How do I get those printed? So we'll talk about that. Andi will be completing a project like spread of a month out of baby's life. And I was talk about using a handbook, which is another pocket page designed scrapbook as another way to document baby's. First year.