A Walk in the Woods

As I mentioned in my last post, I began to scrapbook as a way of documenting Lucy's life.  When I was young photography was a very different animal.  You would have a film of 24 or 36 and those few pictures would be precious (well the ones that actually came out ok once you'd got them back from the processing shop) and were carefully placed into albums by my mum.

This was the same as I was growing up and holidays, parties, nights out would all fit on one film.  In a way I'm grateful for this now as I cannot imagine the kind of things that would be on social media if facebook had existed when I was in my formative years (it's bad enough what goes on there now I'm approaching the big 40).  I now have a select number of albums covering those special occasions in my life.

Of course all that has changed now with the advent of digital photography.  I went out and bought a fancy camera when I realised I needed better quality photos for my project work.  I now have thousands of photos of birthdays, Christmases, holidays and generally just day to day life stored on my laptop.  Sometimes I can spend hours looking through them but up until I found scrapbooking that's about all that happened.  They were never printed off and put in albums.  An occasional few made it to photo frames and were put out for people to see but most just sat there.

Now I can pick out my favourite images and create something that is special and a reminder of happy days.  I always write a bit about the situation as though I'm writing to an older Lucy and telling her about her life.  Although the pictures and the design are the creative part the journaling is important as a reminder of people, places and dates.  I used to spend hours going through old photos with my nan and unless the names of those on the photo were written on the back then it was difficult for her to remember who some of them were.  Hopefully this way Lucy will always know who she's met in her life.

Now some are a feature on her bedroom wall.

 

A recent family day out was to St Ives Woods in Bingley.  When we had our Labradors we used to go here quite often but since Lucy has been born we haven't been until then.  On May Bank Holiday we went for a walk there. 

 

Lucy loved it.

 

She rushed around the woods looking for all the carved figures that they have throughout the woods.  She cuddled the fairies and said hello to them all.  She thought the little dwarf with his pants down was hilarious.  She wasn't very happy about the scary witch and wouldn't go near but was happy to have her photo taken with the rest of them.

 

Now I took a number of photos (just on my phone) and these could quite easily have stayed there.  However, it was such a lovely day that when we got home I set about taking those photos and turning them into scrapbook pages.  Now a memory has been created that will be there for Lucy to look back on and perhaps recreate with her own children in many years to come.