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The Not So Perfect Family Journal
By Polly | May 12, 2008
What I Think I Know - A monthly tongue in cheek commentary of things I’ve learned (or so I think)….
At one point in my life, I had dreams of capturing all of our family’s life memories in a beautifully decorated, perfectly designed, and magnificently color coordinated scrapbook. I was going to do one for every year of our life and they would be handed down from generation to generation. Each scrapbook would capture all the most important parts of our lives as well as our hopes and dreams. They would be the epitome of the perfect family journal and my daughters would fight over who got to keep them after I died. That was my dream…
Well needless to say our first epic family journal is sitting somewhere in my basement completely unfinished. I think the year was 2002 and I maybe got a total of four pages done. It wasn’t for a lack of desire but rather a combination of my innate lack of eye for design and an overwhelming feeling they needed to be perfect.
So out of confusion and frustration, I gave up the idea of scrapbooking our lives. I continued to take photos that are proudly stored somewhere on my computer’s hard drive and I continued to save some of the more important mementos of our lives of which are safely stored in boxes in my closet.
And I was more or less happy with this solution until my daughters started finding it fun to reminisce during family dinners about all our good times. Remembering things I had completely forgotten and making me realize how some of the most seemingly trivial things like a cow spitting on Jennifer or a hen biting Katie can be so meaningful to four young girls.
And I suddenly realized we didn’t need a perfectly designed, beautifully decorated, and magnificently color coordinated scrapbook. All we needed was a not so perfect family journal to capture the thoughts and memories of four little girls who had a much deeper appreciation for our history than I ever realized. And so our family journal was born. We don’t do any cropping, or use special cardstock and stickers. We just glue, write, and draw from the heart.
Remember, it always the little things.
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Topics: Building Strong Families, What I Think I Know |